Aronofsky’s Black Swan as a Postmodern Fairy Tale: Mirroring a Narcissistic Society

Based on the plot of Swan Lake, Black Swan depicts an ingenue’s metamorphosis into a woman and a prima ballerina that contains a fairy-tale plot in which a naïve heroine overcomes enemies and obstacles in order to achieve success and sexual maturity. Unlike a traditional fairy tale, this cinematic tale concludes with death and the clear distinctions between good and evil, helper and adversary and reality vs. fantasy are fluid. As in many fairy tales, the film criticizes the values of its era, namely, the narcissistic aspects of contemporary society with its excessive worship of youth, beauty and celebrity, and its most pernicious results—escape into fantasy and insanity, aggressive rivalry, violence, and self-destruction.

Ratmansky

This chapter explores how the work of post-Soviet choreographer Alexei Ratmansky pursues what he calls “a brilliant development that wasn’t actually fulfilled.” With a paradoxical faith in historical continuity (given the Stalin-era “interruption”), this Russian émigré takes up not only where early Soviet ballet left off in the mid-1930s but even before, with Marius Petipa before twentieth-century gigantism got its hands on him. Whether through the relaxed posture, the dizzying but nonchalant steps, the crosshatched steps, or the corps in relation to the soloist, Ratmansky’s ballets bring out what an authoritarian system—of nation, ballet troupe, or ballet—represses. This applies to all his work: the original creations, adaptations, and historical reconstructions. The chapter treats a wide swath of his ballets, with particular attention to Swan Lake, Russian Seasons, and The Shostakovich Trilogy.

Liam Scarlett

This chapter examines the work and career of British choreographer Liam Scarlett (born 1986), former artist in residence at The Royal Ballet (2012-2020), and artistic associate with Queensland Ballet (2016-2020). This chapter charts Scarlett’s meteoric rise to become one of the most highly sought-after contemporary ballet creators, placing his oeuvre within the British ballet heritage and the wider international dance field of the twenty-first century. A Royal Ballet School graduate, Scarlett began his global career subsequent to his first major Royal Ballet commission in 2010; therefore, this account is of a choreographer in what may be seen as his early years. Scarlett’s output comprises both plotless and narrative one-act ballets and full-evening works. He also produced The Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake in 2018. Scarlett’s choreographic style is rooted in classical ballet in the British tradition, following Sir Frederick Ashton and Sir Kenneth MacMillan, yet he grew up in a culture where contemporary dance was popular and respected, and he has worked alongside radical creator Wayne McGregor at The Royal Ballet. Scarlett’s works show a clear influence of non-traditional balletic norms, and his narrative ballets tend towards darkly dramatic themes. His international career includes commissions for major ballet companies in Australia, the United States of America, New Zealand, Denmark and Norway, and key works include Asphodel Meadows (2010), Viscera (2012), and Frankenstein (2016).

James Kudelka

James Kudelka glides comfortably between the worlds of ballet, modern dance, and postmodern dance. As one of Canada’s most prolific choreographers, he has a repertoire that bridges classical and contemporary modes as he moves skillfully between revisiting classical behemoths such as Swan Lake and creating entirely new works driven by his masterful relationship to music and his ability to push the boundaries of ballet vocabulary and partnering. This chapter contextualizes Kudelka’s work within the historical narrative of ballet in Canada and his impact on the repertoires of the National Ballet of Canada and Les Grands Ballet Canadiens. Kudelka’s dominant themes of love, sex, and death; his vocabulary and strong emphasis on artistic collaboration; and his musical awareness are all crucial elements of his creative process and are integral to his exploration of the human condition through ballet.

New Narratives from Old Texts

This chapter briefly examines two early Australian works, Terra Australis (1946), by Edouard Borovansky, and The Display (1964), by Robert Helpmann. In these works, both choreographers used a strong narrative structure to focus on issues that were significant in Australian society and culture at the time the ballets were made. The chapter then highlights in greater depth two works, Nutcracker: The Story of Clara (1992) and Swan Lake (2002), created by choreographer Graeme Murphy in collaboration with his creative associate Janet Vernon and designer Kristian Fredrikson. It examines the way in which Murphy and his collaborative team recontextualized old and well-known texts to speak powerfully to a contemporary audience, to bring exceptional drama and realism to contemporary dance, and to give audiences completely new and challenging ways of reading well-known works from the international ballet repertoire.

THE FORM OF THE SUITE IN BALLET AND ITS METRORHYTHMIC ORGANIZATION

The article reveals the peculiarities of metrorhythmic organization of the classical dance cycle (suite), typical for Russian ballet of the XIXth century and its evolution in the early XXth century under the influence of innovations in the field of rhythm in the ballets by Igor Stravinsky. The purpose of this article is to find mechanisms of interaction between dance and music based on coordination of their temporal parameters. The material of analysis is the classical dance cycle that performs both compositional and dramaturgical functions in the ballet. Apart from the metrorhythmic and compositional system of organizing time in ballet music, other types of time can be distinguished: real, psychological (subjective) and conceptual, artistic time organizing the processes of the characters' life cycle and the development of action in the virtual time of the artwork. In a classical dance cycle in each number, real time predominates, but when the numbers alternate, subject to the principle of contrast, the conceptual time has a corrective effect. The alternation of musical and choreographic numbers in a ballet determines the rhythm of the form or "compositional rhythm" (according to V. P. Bobrovsky). The correlation of temporal proportions of numbers is considered on the example of ballets "Swan Lake" by P. Tchaikovsky and "Petrushka" by I. Stravinsky. The compositional unit is the duration of the stage segment of the musical form, the change of which creates the rhythm of the form.