Dance Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Irish take on Swan Lake
A classic ballet gets a magical makeover with an Irish twist.
The YouTube trailer of Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Swan Lake shows a dancer desperately flapping huge wings strapped to her arms, a fierce man shouting, inspired footwork to lyrical Irish music and masses of floating white feathers. It is raw, compelling and intense. There is not a pointe shoe in sight.
In Loch na hEala, or Swan Lake, KeeganDolan has used one of the great ancient myths of Irish literature, the Children of Lir, to examine themes of transformation, capture and muteness. Although these are themes in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, the choreographer says from Ireland, “Swan Lake is one of the great classic myths found in many European countries. It is a little bit strange that we associate the story with Tchaikovsky’s version. I don’t think he has the monopoly on Swan Lake.
“I have been hearing about the Children of Lir since I was a little boy. There is a beautiful statue in Dublin inspired by the transformation of these children into swans for 900 years by their jealous stepmother. So, swans always had an important meaning to me. Once you’ve been told a story like that as a child, a swan is no longer a swan – it is potentially a transformed person.”
The swans in his interpretation are “beautiful, noble and graceful. The ones coming to Ireland to escape winter further north in Europe are whooper swans. They have a hard life. They live in the lakes, which is tough, wet and cold, but they never complain. Swans make little noise, so they are very interesting symbols.”
His adaptation uses the skeleton of the ballet, but liberates the myth from the familiarity of Tchaikovsky’s music, relocating it into an older, contemporary cultural setting, in this instance, the Irish Midlands.
“There are some great characters in the ballet, but the narrative is very simple and it can suffer from that. Because ballet people don’t talk, it can become two-dimensional. I wanted to fix those problems by making the characters more complex, exploring their relationships and also allowing some of them to speak.”
Several stories are interwoven in the production. One deals with abuse in the Catholic church. “When that happens, where someone is abused or hurt maybe as a child, they never get a voice, they never get to tell their story; if they try, they are not believed, so they internalise the story – something happens to them. The swan can’t tell you of its suffering: it remains silent and incredibly beautiful, and this is a really interesting idea.
“I thought a lot about myths and how often we reduce them into silly, childlike things, but we must remember that these stories have been around for a long time because they have something important to tell us.
“We are creating myths all the time – news stories eventually become myths or become the myths of our future. So, all of this became the stories on which I built the show.”
Dublin band Slow Moving Clouds created the score, drawing on folk music from Ireland and northern Europe and traditional string instruments, such as the Swedish nyckelharpa. “It has an old sound, so as soon as you hear it, you feel your imagination travelling backwards in time.”
“It is a bit strange that we associate the story with Tchaikovsky’s version. I don’t think he has the monopoly on Swan Lake.”
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Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, Teaċ Damsa, New Zealand Festival, March 14-17, St James, Wellington.