Swan Lake Notes

Back to Swan Lake Program Page
Julius Reisinger choreographed the first Swan Lake, which premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1877. It was moderately successful, but Tchaikovsky, who had hoped that his first attempt at ballet music would be enthusiastically received, died in 1893 believing it was a failure. In 1895, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov created their masterpiece, and, for many ballet enthusiasts, their names became synonymous with Swan Lake. SF Ballet performed its first full-length Swan Lake by Willam Christensen in 1940, and in 1988, Tomasson created a new version with changes that clarified the story but retained much of the choreography and all of the spirit of Petipa and Ivanov’s landmark ballet.
    “It’s hard not to like Swan Lake,” said Tomasson in 2006. “I remember seeing films of it when I was very young, and to me it was the ultimate in ballet. It’s ballet at its most beautiful.” Despite his previous production’s success, Tomasson decided to refresh the ballet with a new vision. “We staged a new production of Swan Lake 20 years ago, and I felt that it was now time to take it to the next step,” he says. “Swan Lake is the most well known ballet of all full lengths, and probably the most universally loved. But I didn’t want it to become a museum piece. I felt that this was the right time, and I found the right designer.”
    The “right designer” is Jonathan Fensom, a Tony Award nominee (for Journey’s End in 2007) who has created costumes and sets for dozens of plays in London’s West End and on Broadway, plus some opera. His love for his work is obvious, saturating his everyday life, and he laughs when he says that he is never without a camera. “Inevitably, your experience brings something to whatever you design. I’m constantly on a research trip,” he says. For this production, he “borrowed” from architectural and decorative elements in the Louvre, San Francisco City Hall, and the War Memorial Opera House.
    Tomasson says he was intrigued by the idea of working with a designer who had not done ballet before. For Fensom, whose limited ballet viewing included The Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake, “the thought of doing a ballet was incredibly exciting—to respect what Swan Lake was as a classical piece of work but actually lift it. You see something like Phantom of the Opera now, and it seems dated,” he says.“When it came out in the early ’80s it was fantastic! Times change; we move on. We all get more sophisticated, and I think we need to push the boundaries a little farther.”
    While Tomasson liked the idea of pushing the boundaries visually to give new life to this venerable ballet, his intent, as before, was to stay true to the original, choreographically and at heart. “Particularly the second act—you don’t really mess with that,” he says. “But there are so many other things you can do, scenically and with costumes, and even choreographically to some extent, in the first act and third act, which I had already done. A lot of it I kept, but there have also been elements that I have changed; it has to do with rethinking the whole production.” One such alteration was replacing a waltz danced by the corps de ballet with a pas de deux for Odette and Siegfried. Tomasson wanted Siegfried to approach Odette to convey his sorrow and ask for forgiveness. “For storytelling, I felt that I needed to make [them] connect in the end and explain why they both die.” He kept that pas de deux in this production but chose more dramatic music for it.
    In terms of staging, the most important change is the addition of a Prologue. “Helgi said that though it’s called Swan Lake, it was always Siegfried’s story, because he was the character you were introduced to first,” says Fensom. “We wanted to make it Odette’s story, and to do that we needed to introduce her then.” Understanding how Rothbart brought Odette under his power, making her a swan by day and a woman by night, allows us to accept that Siegfried, searching for meaning in his life, could find it in this glorious, mysterious bird/woman. “Who is this swan that he falls in love with? I felt I needed to clarify that she is a real person that Rothbart has turned into a swan,” says Tomasson.
For this new production, choreographer and designer worked in concert to present Swan Lake in a way that makes it accessible to anyone, even first-time ballet-goers who don’t know the story. Doing homework by reading about a ballet’s story and evolution can make the viewing experience more rewarding, but it shouldn’t be a prerequisite for a captivating evening of theater. In this case, the staging, environment, costumes, lighting, plus the added component of projections, combine to make the story clear and compelling.
    The visual components of this Swan Lake echo its themes and emotions. Traditionally, the sets tend to be literal; Siegfried celebrates his birthday in the palace garden, he discovers Odette at a forest-ringed lake, and columns, drapes, and chandeliers adorn the ballroom in Act 3. But Fensom’s approach was different. Each set consists of one huge scenic element: simple, striking, and symbolic. The first-act set, a barrier instead of a cocoon-like garden, “represents the oppression that Siegfried feels. He’s trapped,” Fensom says. The lake, in his words, is “raw and rough and wild.” And behind the elegant, abstract architecture of the third act, a vestige of Siegfried’s lakeside encounter reminds us that he is now torn between two worlds.
    The starkness of the open stage emphasizes the scale of the set pieces and the sculptural nature of their design—and for Fensom, the latter is key. Last November, he spoke of his plans to discuss with lighting designer Jennifer Tipton “the sculptural qualities of what we have in the space, because we light dancers by the essence of them—they are sculptural forms in space, and I wanted to treat the set in the same way.”
    Fensom’s costume designs reflect this sensibility as well. Based on a period with the same elegance and simplicity as the sets, the silhouettes have depth that adds individuality to the characters. “I wanted to treat it much more like an opera chorus, where everyone is different,” says the designer. “We create a world where they’re all individuals who, at a wonderful moment, come together and dance. When you think of something like the early 19th century, older people would wear silhouettes that were from slightly earlier, say from the 1790s. Peasants would have a completely different silhouette because they’re working class. So we’ve created a world that real characters inhabit.”
Creating that world involves artists and craftspeople in two countries, at the San Francisco Opera scenic and costume shops and seven individual costume makers in and around London, Fensom’s home base. Overseeing the sets is Vincent Armanino, foreman of the SF Opera scene shop, while Nancy Endy, SF Ballet’s costume production coordinator, orchestrates the construction of the hundreds of tutus, dresses, jackets, and cloaks.
    Work on both design aspects began last summer, long before casting had been decided, which is tough for the costumers. Endy does as much preparation as she can without knowing body types and heights, and then, with casting in place, the costumers ramp up their pace. Fitting sessions for everyone from students and supers to the six pairs of Odette/Odiles and Siegfrieds filled the fall schedule.
“The design is a fairly literal translation of a period, so what you’ll see is very accurate in terms of styling and palette,” says Endy. “We’re using natural fabrics; the fabrics in those days were more rustic, but we’re using silks and linens, so there’s a richness to it. It’s a very authentic look, and that’s the challenge; it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to movement. So what is challenging is maintaining the integrity of the design but translating it in such a way that it will function onstage.”
    Although it seems complicated to have multiple costumers working simultaneously, there are advantages. “You can accomplish a lot more in a shorter amount of time because they’re not working sequentially,” explains Endy. “It means a lot more coordination on my part, but it always works out. There are a lot of people flying back and forth, fabric going back and forth across the ocean, and lots of emails and telephone calls.”
Because a production like this is built to last for roughly 20 years, Endy plans for the future. “You always want to have extras of any given role; it’s amazing how the bodies can change. And of course these costumes are made with big seams and hems—you can never predict what you’ll get in the future.” Compared to the 1988 production, the amount of variety in the costumes makes the show “very dynamic,” Endy says. “I think it will be much more lush to the eye. This one is a tapestry.”
    Making designs functional is Armanino’s job too. Drawings and construction plans, samples of decorative details, and spreadsheets and flowcharts fill his office in the cavernous scene shop. That’s where he masterminds the huge logistical job of getting the sets built and painted on time and within budget. Like Endy, he’s armed with both a big-picture perspective and an eye for detail.
Because of the sets’ scale and function, they are built with structural materials like plywood and aluminum rather than Styrofoam or flats (canvas-covered wooden frames). Making the job more complex is the fact that the sets must be built in pieces that will fit into a truck for touring. Other challenges include requirements for scene changes, like one gigantic piece that rolls on but can’t appear to be on wheels. It’s up to Armanino to figure out how to achieve the designer’s vision within the limitations of the stage space and scene changes. Armanino makes those decisions in conjunction with other department heads. “Sometimes it’s pretty self-evident,” he says, “but there are places where you have to make concessions.” Referring to a seamless wall that needs to break in half, he says, “The scenic artists will have to patch it a little bit every time they build it for a show. So there’s ongoing touchup. A lot of thought goes into all this.”
    Normally, some decorative elements are purchased, but Fensom’s designs require a custom approach. For example, for a fence detail, Armanino says, “we’re going to make a mold and mold the pieces out of plastic and see how that works.” He points out some custom-made curved moldings; they’re like nothing you’d find in a catalog. “We made a straight mold and sent it to New Jersey, to a guy that makes flexible molding. He’ll bend it to our specifications. The designer didn’t take anything out of a book. So we had to cut a little, shave a little, add a little to come up with what was in the print.”
    When everything converges—concept, choreography, visual elements, music, and performance—what audiences will see is the culmination of a process that began in 2006, when Tomasson first started thinking about giving his dancers a Swan Lake that speaks to today’s audiences. As he was planning the 2008 Repertory Season’s New Works Festival, which he expected to be in a “more contemporary choreography mode,” he envisioned a return to classicism for 2009. “I felt that this would be a good time to have the pendulum swing back, to show something tried and true, in a different setting,” he says. “It all goes back to the Company’s logo and why I chose it. It represents a certain way of looking at dance now; it’s different, it’s exciting. I wanted to keep that momentum going, bringing it now to Swan Lake. It was time.”