Tradition and Transition at the Royal

Fall 2012 at London’s Covent Garden found the Royal Ballet, one of the world’s great companies, playing conservator of tradition, with twenty performances of Tschaikovsky’s Swan Lake (and twenty-one of The Nut-cracker, which I missed). At the same time, the troupe celebrated Kenneth MacMillan, the choreographer whose work, more than anyone else’s, helped the Royal reimagine itself as a modern ballet company in the 1960s and ’70s. (The company’s ongoing modernization continued in a program of three current works set to living composers, to be discussed in an upcoming article.) Save for his handsome Neapolitan dance in Swan Lake’s Act 3 divertissement, the absence of any ballets by Frederick Ashton, the choreographer who defined the Royal style over five decades, left a major gap in the fall programming, with no bridge between Petipa and Ivanov’s classicism and MacMillan’s expressionistic directness spiked with trendy sex and violence. But unlike the New York City Ballet, which performs dozens of ballets in any given season, the Royal shares its home with the Royal Opera, an arrangement that limits its performance schedule and therefore the number of ballets it can squeeze into an autumn; Ashton masterworks patiently awaited spring 2013 for their turn.

Under the firm guidance of Ninette de Valois, who brought the Russian classics into the company, and sparked by Ashton’s rapid creative development, the Royal began in 1931 as the Vic-Wells Ballet, performing at both the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington and the Old Vic on the South Bank, and featuring Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, stars rescued from Diaghilev’s defunct Ballets Russes. In 1939, now dancing exclusively at Sadler’s Wells, the company became the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, then relocated after the war to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. In 1956 a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth made the company the Royal Ballet.

In the current production by former Royal principal dancer and artistic director Anthony Dowell, from 1987, Swan Lake epitomizes qualities that most of the Royal’s fans love—a tradition of narrative dance, sumptuous costumes and industrial-strength sets (both by Yolanda Sonnabend), and star-power, and often excellence, in principal roles. The production, which prizes elegance and grace over dramatic tension and emphasis, opened the Fall 2012 season on October 8 with an astounding performance by Marianela Nuñez in the double role of Odette, the enchanted white swan queen, and the black swan Odile, her evil twin. Nuñez’s supple spine, confidence on pointe, sumptuous port de bras, and way of flinging her torso back in arabesque all magnify her swan queen ethereality. In her precise arabesques, as she gazes searchingly left, her working leg strikes two o’clock; in the final act, she holds one arabesque on pointe for five seconds as the music rudely abandons her, anticipating her abandonment to the sorcerer Von Rothbart. She alternately plunges and melts into deep backbends upon the arm of her Siegfried, Thiago Soares, like, well, a dying swan, and when he hoists her high above, left leg extended backwards, right leg, bent at the knee, braced against it, her design looks fit for a temple pediment.

As Odette, Nuñez dances magnificently but languorously, and conductor Boris Gruzin’s tempos unfold unusually slowly. In Odette’s Act 2 solo variation, a slow series of high kicks and held arabesques typically accelerates into a virtuoso circular chain of turns, a great applause machine. In the Royal version, however, the variation never picks up speed or momentum. The slowness gives Odette great majesty yet, ironically, detracts from her erotic appeal. The production instead aims for a schematic contrast between Odette and Odile, but a more complex comparison between them would emerge if their different brands of seduction—Odette’s innocent enchantment of Siegfried and Odile’s cynical designs on him—overlapped more.

In Act 3, Nuñez supplies Odile with all the speed and technical dazzle—and all the sex—that she has sacrificed to Odette’s holy suffering in Act 2. The contrast is astonishing. Irresistible in...