What a crowd pleaser this performance is! Stamping and whistling at the end! It’s a hit! Helped considerably by a maelstrom of white feathers and a danced finale to a highly seductive and rhythmically potent piece of music. Feathers billow, swirl, rain, explode all over the stage and are blown out into the auditorium! It is a Christmas rampage of feathered snow! And like Christmas, the audience is made very merry and joyous by this theatrically powerful NZ Festival offering!

The stars in this performance, for me, have Alex Leonhartsberger at the top of the list, but I wish he danced more. Mikel Murfi as the narrator of many characters and voices impresses for his sheer virtuosity and range as an actor and storyteller. Rachel Poirier as Finola stands out superbly when she’s the demented and distressed black swan. Elizabeth Dalman’s laughter during the birthday party is eerily affecting; hers is a visually enticing presence throughout. The music does its job beautifully and masterfully, as do the rest of the male and female cast of dancers in their supporting roles as ‘corps’.

Choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan with this production is adding his stamp to the Swan Lake legacy. Like practically every other major contemporary dance-maker, he is tackling one of the most timeless of ballet classics. Modernised and set somewhere in Ireland, he updates and retells the original story. The linking of Catholic priests and sexual predation is a theme. As too is that of lonely, mentally unstable white men with guns. This is topical given the recent school shooting in America (along with all the others preceding it).

Except for its finale, Keegan’s work is dark and oppressive. Episodic in structure, it alternates spoken narration with danced interludes. There is a contemporising of gender play with male dancers used as female suitors to the protagonist. The staging aesthetic and design are in the style of poor theatre. Big sheets of black or clear plastic are used to create a lake or to capture a memory. Tall aluminium ladders are there to climb or suspend large feathered wings. Props, tables, trunks, a wheelchair, concrete blocks and other paraphernalia are exposed around the stage. Three musicians with various stringed instruments sit in front of microphone stands on a raised area behind the action. The overall effect is hard-hitting with lots of grit, dinginess and grunge. This is the not-pretty version of Swan Lake.

Keegan, in his programme notes, speaks much about depression and advises, ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark – it is your friend.’ The dark in this performance is portrayed in numerous ways and extremes. The lust-driven priest is an obvious source and manifestation of darkness. As too are the expressions onstage of isolation, loneliness, ostracism and withdrawal. The damaged state of sexually abused vulnerable young women is portrayed clearly by both the acting and costume of Finola in her guise as the black swan. The ‘friendly’ nature of darkness to which Keegan alludes takes form and is sentimentalised somewhat in the tender duet between the traumatised Finola and the central male character, Jimmy O’Reilly. Of course, true to the original synopsis, tragedy triumphs. The black plastic lake swallows Finola and then deposits her corpse at Jimmy’s feet, exposing him as her possible killer and to the inevitable hail of police bullets that he invites. A grim friend this darkness!

The images, logic, modernising, referencing and layers of meaning that can be read into this production make it complex. The original Swan Lake is a parable about the blurred lines between good and evil. It aims at symbolism and was created at the same time as the birth of psychology in the hands of Freud, with his controversial theories about the repressed sexualised nature of parent-child relationships. Keegan’s updated rendition of this ballet treads similar territory. Finola as the black swan to which Jimmy is drawn is a lookalike for his mother. The otherworldly fairy tale nature of the original is also grounded and expanded into the ‘everyday’ with references to religion, community, cultural specificity and societal impoverishment. This also involves an inversion, loftiness is made low, the Prince is now an isolated man in working-class Ireland. There are slippages in his psyche between his internal and exterior worlds. The work suggests a weakening of his grasp on reality: is the lake real or an interior place to which he retreats?

The apolitical of the original is, by all of this, made political. The goal here is dance theatre with a social bite. We come away with thoughts. We come away sober, buoyed only by the joyous abundance of a feather storm finale involving a beautifully crafted group dance for the entire ensemble, made possible from god knows how many slaughtered bird carcasses. 

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