Good Swan, Bad Swan: Dancing Swan Lake

Dancing Swan Lake is every ballerina's dream.

It's the one ballet we all imagine ourselves doing.

And for me, it was one of the first ballets I started getting to know

and the solo I chose to do was Black Swan.

From the beginning, for me, I knew that I would be doing Swan Lake

on a big stage somewhere around the world.

I remember as a student watching swans on the water.

Observing for hours, trying to work out how a swan moves

so that I could incorporate it into my dancing.

Years later, I realised that this ballet was not about swans,

but about two ideals.

The ideal of the white swan - innocence, purity and honesty,

and the black swan - manipulation, dishonesty and eroticism.

It is no accident that, when people think of ballet,

their first thought is Swan Lake.

It almost defines the genre.

Yet it's extraordinary to think

that nothing about it is defined.

Tchaikovsky's handwritten score is lost.

No-one knows who wrote the story.

Even the choreography, passed down the ages by word of mouth,

remains unfixed.

Yet the themes Swan Lake embodies are timeless.

Unfulfilled yearning,

deception,

tragic love.

They speak to us just as vividly today as ever.

What's more, the lead role is unique

in all of classical ballet.

Unusually, this ballet demands

of the lead ballerina to portray

two different characters.

Each the polar opposite

of one another.

Odette, the white swan, and Odile, the black swan.

And how's that reflected on the choreography?

Odette, the white swan, and Odile, the black swan,

both do the same steps.

We do pirouettes

and we do soutenus,

we do arabesques,

but the way we do it, the intensity,

the attack is completely different.

Like in literature,

the words are the same.

Romeo and Macbeth both say "love".

What they mean, the intention,

is completely different.

It demands extreme physical endurance

and a faultless ballet technique.

When you actually get somebody

who emotionally understands the dual characters as well

as being able to physically do it,

it's wonderful, but phenomenally rare.

I'm going to take you backstage to show you my life as a performer

and what it really takes to prepare for this thrilling role.

The living tradition of how the steps are handed down

and evolve and how to read them.

And explore the history of Swan Lake

from troubled beginnings

to immortal classic.

I guess...

..the moment I like the most,

actually, about the process is...

..this moment.

I feel like I've erased my angles

and I've erased my lines

and I've erased a little bit my face

and I've muted my eyebrows,

which are so strong and defining

and I kind of, yeah, I erased

a little bit everything about me

and then, it's a blank canvas.

I can start putting on

this other face of another person

and then, see what comes out today.

The attraction of Swan Lake

is many things.

First, of course, the music.

The music is beautiful and it's a music that we all get to know

very early on in our careers...

..and also you really can be free in it.

I think it's partly why it has survived for so long,

because you can absorb the new range of movement

that dancers have gained through centuries.

In Swan Lake, there really is space for each ballerina

to make it their own.

Legend has it that it was on

a family summer holiday in the Ukraine

that Tchaikovsky wrote a little ballet called The Lake Of Swans

for the children to perform.

According to his young nephew, Yuri Davidov,

the principal theme was the Song Of The Swans.

Known now to us as one of the most loved melodies in classical music.

Tchaikovsky really knew

every instrument of the orchestra inside out

and he knew the best notes on those instruments.

And the best note on the oboes of the time was F sharp...

HE PLAYS "Swan Theme"

..cos we have the opening of the ballet...

..and then we have, of course...

So he's using it, just an octave,

eight notes, but that very small range of notes,

somehow gives it a poignance

that you just don't see in ballet music of the time.

I don't first appear until Act 2,

but I always make sure I'm in the wings

to hear Tchaikovsky's Prologue.

From the very first notes,

the music creates an atmosphere of melancholy and yearning.

It transports me into the very heart of this mythical world.

SWAN LAKE PROLOGUE PLAYS

We are still familiar, from our own childhood,

with stories of castles and princesses.

But in the 19th century,

the fairy tale had a greater resonance for adults.

In formal European society,

show and etiquette were still of paramount importance,

but there also lurked an appetite for something other.

The belief in a parallel supernatural world

where longing and darker realities dominated.

The fairy tale of Swan Lake immerses us fully in both worlds.

It was on a tour of western Europe that a young Tchaikovsky

took a boat trip down the Rhine.

What he saw along its banks, the magical castles and palaces,

can't have failed to impress his hungry mind.

And it is the fairy-tale setting

of a great castle in medieval Germany that opens Swan Lake.

Courtiers are celebrating Prince Siegfried's coming of age.

He has everything going for him,

but is suffocated by the formality of life at court

and longs for something more natural.

For me, he's another lost soul.

A man trying to find his own identity.

He has lived a sheltered life

and now he's asked by his own mother to find a wife, settle down,

grow up and be a king.

It's the Prince's search that drives Swan Lake.

Repressed desires -

a preoccupation for artists

at the end of the 19th century.

It's just all about your thoughts, that's all.

In the variation, you have to be at your most lost.

You're in trouble with your mother, you're sad,

she wants you to get married, I don't know what to do.

So you've got to have that weight in the variation,

that weight of sorrow and sadness.

'Everybody has the face, everybody has a working face and then,

'when the door is closed, everybody has another face.

'I think the Prince is very similar to that.

'You know, he does have to keep face'

and I think he does all the way through Act 1,

but underneath all of that, there is this terrible sadness

'because he can't find love,

'that's the real him.'

..and up, plie.

Good, plie.

Plie, and up...

'Every movement in the variation

'creates a feeling of sadness.

'It's the way you take an arabesque,'

it's the way you put your arms and your head down,

it's the way you look up.

Those things create the conversation of the piece.

You should feel like him at the end of that variation,

you should feel as,

as miserable as he is.

In his personal life, all was not well with Tchaikovsky.

It's now well-known that he was ambivalent on the subject of

his own sexuality and was struggling under pressure to marry and conform.

But his artistic life was flourishing.

Aged 35, he was already famous for

his symphonies and a piano concerto.

It was the commission of Swan Lake from a friend at the Bolshoi

that gave Tchaikovsky the opportunity

to explore a whole new world

and unlock ballet's real potential.

Ballet music before Tchaikovsky was like this.

House composers within the imperial theatre system were subject

to the whims of choreographers, who usually demanded

a succession of merely formulaic dance numbers.

It was music by the yard.

Tchaikovsky blew everything that had gone before out of the water

and, I mean, Swan Lake is the most typical of these.

Thematic development actually was part and parcel of the drama,

it wasn't just music for dance, it wasn't just music for mime -

the two elements worked together.

Whenever Rothbart, the evil sorcerer, arrives,

the music creates a frenzy you just can't resist.

Swan Lake has particular demands.

The kind of stamina you need is

the combination of a marathon runner and a sprinter.

What we do is long,

it lasts for three hours

but it has huge bursts of energy.

Nerves is something that changes through your career.

I wasn't a very nervous dancer when I was very young,

I felt no-one had any expectations of me,

so I had nothing to lose.

Then, as my career progressed,

I didn't want to let the public down,

but I also realised they were really related

to how much practice I put into a show.

The more I practised, the less nervous I was.

March 1877, and the premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow loomed.

However, even during rehearsals,

rumours emerged that the chorography was weak and incoherent.

While some of the cast claimed Tchaikovsky's music

was un-danceable.

The opening night drew a packed house, but mixed reactions.

Everything was more than once,

and Tchaikovsky's ballet music certainly was.

He'd really found ways of depicting emotions that had not been seen

by ballet audiences up until that point.

His thematic and harmonic styles were very contemporary

and very modern at the time, which did turn off a lot of audiences.

It is unthinkable that Swan Lake might have been lost forever.

Maybe it was the choreography,

maybe cuts in theatre budgets,

no-one really knows why, but after just a few seasons, it petered out.

It was Tchaikovsky's unforgettable music

and the collaboration of two unlikely choreographers

that would save it for another generation.

It's strange, putting the headdress on feels

like putting years of tradition.

Somehow, I suddenly see all the other ballerinas

that have worn these feathers and what that means.

The nerves kind of go away and it's just the desire to go on

and perform.

I first appear as Odette within a flock of swans.

A sorcerer has condemned me to remain half-human, half-swan.

The spell can only be broken

by the love of someone who has never loved before

and who swears to love me forever.

Enter Prince Siegfried,

who's fled court to go hunting.

Mesmerised by Odette's beauty,

he can't bring himself to shoot.

You can see Odette as just a victim,

a victim of misfortune.

Or you can see it as a projection

of the desire of a frustrated man

that has to find someone to marry

and manages to find the one thing he cannot marry.

The basic language of myths and fairy tales

looks at all the deep mysteries of being human -

death, sex, desire.

They tackle the question of what is forbidden

and what is allowed in any given society, and that keeps changing.

So Odette is, at the beginning,

a vision of some transcendent ideal

that Siegfried needs to be completed

as a man, that's how he falls

in love with something that is going to make him a greater person.

To dance Odette presents

a particular set of challenges

you have to find a convincing

balance between her vulnerability

and the movements of a swan.

Helping me rehearse this is Loipa Araujo, one of my great mentors.

A former principal with the National Ballet of Cuba,

she has performed this role

many times herself.

As soon as Odette appears,

it's just a sentiment of sorrow.

I'm a woman but I have

to move like a swan,

but always remember that you have, instead of arms,

you should think you should have wings.

Tienes que cambiar, pero hazlo mas lento. Si.

LOIPA HUMS

-Y ya que ellos sienten tu mirada...

-OK.

'And there's a certain way of moving wings

'that has to have that quality'

of how the swans would move their heads,

how the swans will clean their feathers

and how, if something's coming,

how they will hide behind the wings.

There is a purity and a strength in the figure of the swan.

They are not small animals, they are powerful, big animals.

And that's what's so difficult - to try and balance the real

characters of a swan, with that vulnerability that Odette has.

And that beauty, that purity,

I think, is very much reflected

on the purity of her character.

The symbol of a swan is a very potent one, and the myth of the

swan maiden is one of the oldest and most captivating legends there is.

Swans have the most powerful myth-generating potential.

The intermediate beings, in almost all world myths and fairy tales,

the beings that can move between the forests and the upper air

are more magical and more powerful.

And watery birds attract even more, because they can dive.

And Swan Lake, towards the end of the 19th century,

is very involved in that era's interest in the unconscious

and in the roots of sexual desire.

You know, just before Freud comes out with the definitive

theory of the unconscious, which we still, in a sense, live by.

The fairy-tale lake where the swans are found,

the dark forest where he goes hunting,

become symbols of the unconscious,

and symbols of the dark, forbidden things that might go on there.

And also of dreams, of fulfilment.

The most likely sources for the story of Swan Lake

are a Russian folk legend, The White Duck,

and a medieval fairy tale from Germany called The Stolen Veil

in which a knight waits for a group of swan maidens to arrive on a lake.

For the corps de ballet, literally the "body of the ballet",

the fluidity of a flock on water created a new opportunity

for synchronous movement.

At the beginning of my career,

I spent over a year as a member of the corps de ballet.

It was really hard work, but also really satisfying.

The success of the corps de ballet doesn't depend on one person,

but on everyone doing their best.

However, when it does work, it's absolutely amazing.

If you look at a ballet like Swan Lake,

75% of it is the corps de ballet.

Of course, they've got to stay in line, look the same

and do all of those things, but there is an emotional quality

to the work as well, which is hugely important.

Heavy elbows, heavy arms...

Through the feet. Run, ladies, with your feet and legs.

'When you have 60 swans breathing together,

'it makes a huge difference.'

There is this intense feeling of sisterhood,

a special alchemy that makes you become just one unit, one person,

hearing each other, feeling each other,

without really having to look around.

Just like if they all become part of you,

and you become part of all of them.

Nothing makes you prouder than when you feel that is one of those

special nights and the audience are breathing with you too.

I love that feeling.

In the past, these women were a representation of society,

order and precision, so it has a kind of Utopian aspect to it.

In Swan Lake, I think they become something more than that,

they become almost a reflection of her inner life,

so that when they're gathered around her, they're not just a frame,

their function's not decorative, it's in fact reflective -

and it's not just synchrony, it's a community.

They exist together in this musical world on this stage,

which becomes its own reality.

That's what the audience is then pulled into, of course.

It was this ravishing scene which led to the phenomenon we know today.

Reworked by Lev Ivanov especially

for Tchaikovsky's memorial concert in 1893,

his new naturalistic choreography

astonished the St Petersburg audience,

and prompted the resurrection of a complete new production.

Drawn irresistibly back to the lakeside,

the Prince is desperate to find the

creature that has so enchanted him.

And the beauty of this moment is

that I too am compelled to find him.

I want to be the soul mate this prince was dreaming of,

however strange and however unobtainable it is -

a man's fantasy of what

the ideal woman should be.

It is quite easy to empathise with Odette, because she's not

quite real, she really is a freak that doesn't fit anywhere.

So I think it is that feeling of not fitting somewhere,

whether it's school or society in general or a new country

where you have no friends, no family.

I think that's what for me she is,

and she's forever looking at somebody that makes her feel

like she belongs, at least to one person.

With folded wings,

I'm showing my vulnerability.

What follows is a pas de deux or a duet,

over the course of which I offer him

my trust and our souls unite.

VIOLIN PLAYS

When I hear the violin solo, I feel I hear the deep voice of Odette.

It is the time she has to tell him about her sorrows and her life

and what she hopes for the future.

The innocence of young love

is something I also explore

through coaching the next generation.

'Lauretta Summerscales is one of our rising stars

'at English National Ballet.'

Too close!

So there, when there are moments when he's really close...

SHE GASPS

-..it's too close.

-Yes, so react?

Yes, exactly.

So, can we do the second one and then we...?

PIANO PLAYS

OK, OK, OK. Yeah.

-Now it's a new phrase.

-Yes.

-You cannot carry that emotion into the new phrase.

-Oh!

So, you look at him again,

there is some moving away, but there is a falling in love.

-OK. It's so complicated.

-Exactly!

It's this roller-coaster of feelings constantly.

So you close, you move away,

but once again, you've made that connection,

that really important connection with his eyes, so you, you go away

but less intense...and then, when you turn around,

it's just an excuse to again look at him.

And then, what you do next is actually quite telling,

because you open up completely.

You see what I mean?

You kind of let go, and trust him,

and he catches you as you fall.

The way with ballet,

especially Swan Lake,

is a way to express yourself

that you cannot any other way.

You have to do it with your body.

The music going through every single muscle -

there's no way you can't naturally do

what it tells you to do.

It's like air -

without that, you couldn't breathe.

I like being very broad

with the arms,

being as big as possible,

but then also having, underneath the eyes,

that you are really vulnerable when you've been really hurt.

Every new generation of dancers

brings a fresh approach to the role,

even though the actual steps for this pas de deux

have remained largely unchanged

since Tchaikovsky's memorial concert 120 years ago.

Watching past masters offers us a great chance to see

how interpretation has evolved over the years.

Alina Cojocaru is a dancer I admire hugely,

and we looked together at two legendary swans

from the last 60 years,

starting with Galina Ulanova, in 1956.

Ulanova was the great prima ballerina of the Bolshoi,

famous for her powerful acting and demonstrative gestures.

-You can see the desperation in her feelings...

-Yeah.

-Like a trapped bird.

-Yes.

-It's almost like she feels it with her...

-With her hands, yes.

-And also it's quite nice to see a small swan.

-Yes.

Somehow now with time, it's developed so much into a swan

-having to be a tall dancer.

-Yeah.

Even the angles that she chooses

to do the steps,

-those small pulls here and there...

-Yes.

-..gives her her unique way

of doing this role.

I think the key importance is for us

to see this as an inspiration.

-Not to imitate.

-Exactly.

'Both Alina and I have been lucky enough to be coached'

by Natalia Makarova.

She transformed the body language

of the role with her fluid style,

one more akin to real swans.

For the first time,

-those arms were really wings.

-Yes.

They were flying as a swan.

Every move you see it's a journey

from one position to another,

through such depth

of physical movement.

The pull away from him

and the melting back into him.

The back and it just keeps on moving

and developing in such a curvy way.

-Yes.

-It's like a constant opposition

within her whole body moving.

Somehow, even when she looks front,

she feels him.

It's like we have 3D now,

everything has wonderful

shapes always.

We've just seen two completely different artists.

-And they haven't changed a step.

-Exactly.

-The steps are the same.

I think Swan Lake it's the clearest of ballets

that one can only grow in,

to be able to find your unique voice and development

in a role like this.

With the culmination of the pas de deux,

the Prince swears undying love to Odette.

But with the approach of dawn, they are too late to break

the sorcerer's spell,

who returns to reclaim his captive.

The swan maiden remains in his power

and the Prince is driven away.

After the success of Ivanov's lakeside scene at Tchaikovsky's

memorial concert, it was the revival of the full ballet

in St Petersburg in 1895 that really fixed the legacy of Swan Lake.

While Ivanov's Russian soul empathised with the poetry of nature,

it was his collaboration with the more formal Marius Petipa

that made the new production so radical.

Unashamedly a Frenchman,

Petipa was part of a vogue in St Petersburg for all things French.

The city itself had been partly inspired

by the palace of Versailles, in France.

And it was there, at the court of Louis XIV,

that we find the roots of classical ballet,

developed from a strict code of etiquette for aristocrats.

Ballet started as an etiquette before it was an art,

a way of acting in society that has to do

with showing yourself physically to be ordered and organised.

So that if you are passing someone on the street and you need to go by,

you don't just walk past them and say, "Oh, excuse me," you know,

the way we would, you were meant to turn your shoulders.

Etiquette books told you this.

This is part of the vocabulary of ballet -

people moved in society as they moved on stage and the two fed each other.

It was Petipa's grounding in the French classical tradition

that enabled him to portray the formality of life at court

that weighs so heavily on the Prince.

For classical ballet, there is no choreographer more important

than Marius Petipa.

He created the stone blocks of classical repertoire -

Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty.

He is the equivalent of, I guess, Mozart for classical music.

Petipa understands the intrinsic ballet vocabulary.

It's like being aware of the natural

accent or the flow of a word.

In the same way he understands that

some steps have a staccato nature,

and some steps have an adagio nature

and he uses them to match the music perfectly.

So if you do Petipa

as it's meant to be done,

you are a musical ballerina,

because you have to be, there's no other way around it.

Back from the forest, the Prince

is now called to the attention

of the Princesses gathered

as possible brides.

Everything about him has changed.

He must break free.

But even as he is decided,

a demonic bombshell is on its way -

the temptress Odile, sent by the evil sorcerer.

Odile is the black swan -

a creature of the night.

She's Rothbart's daughter, the evil wizard.

She's dark, feisty, manipulative,

sexy and she's going to win at any cost.

She's going to get her man whatever it takes.

Throughout the whole of the 19th century,

there was a real obsession with the doppelganger -

whiteness, light, darkness, night.

This idea that lurking within one was the dangerous double,

who would behave in a capricious and malignant fashion.

So the Prince sees Odile, the black swan, the idea of mature sexuality

and lust, as a shadow side of Odette herself - radiant beauty,

youth, virginity, many of the things we see at play in the white swan.

It's all part of that sort of psychosis of the 19th century,

and you know Freud, I think, is right when he intuited

that this was a fear of the dark within.

Gate-crashing the ball with Rothbart,

Odile's first move on the Prince

is to pick up where the white swan left off -

with another pas de deux,

but this time with her own dark twist.

I am an evil seductress

impersonating the one he really loves

and doing it well enough

to fool the Prince.

So the choreography seems to follow

a circular pattern

around the Prince.

It's almost like a boa constrictor, she surrounds him

until he forgets Odette completely

and thinks that Odile

was his swan all along.

She's just getting to know him

and to see how much she can pull and push him.

She becomes more daring

and more rude, and teases him.

First, she makes him embrace her.

You open it up, and here it is,

he closes your arms and you go,

"Not so soon," but you linger

and then, "Not so soon,

"I say when."

He's not looking any more,

so she calls, "Now!"

And then, it's like a cat!

I have you, and I don't want you.

Bye-bye.

Bad woman.

So, as you see,

she's getting harder and harder.

The interesting thing is that,

like everyone when you start being successful at something,

you start enjoying it.

So as she sees he's falling for her,

she starts to actually take quite a lot of pleasure in torturing him.

So, I come back to Rothbart,

and I'm checking that I'm doing the right thing.

And I offer it to him.

And now I just let him take over.

And when he thinks he has me,

I reject him,

and go back to Daddy.

And now I'm just going to take a bit more liberties.

And reject him again,

but now I'm just going to leave a hand, see what happens.

And I take it away.

He's quite offended, so I have to make up and I call him.

And with this step I make him really dizzy.

But then a vision of the White Swan

appears at the castle window to warn him.

As I'm busy playing the Black Swan,

this is a stage with smoke and mirrors.

Odette is at the back.

Rothbart is there making sure the Prince can't see her,

and then tells me, "Make him think you are Odette".

And this is, for me, the most complicated part of this ballet

because I am an evil woman imitating a saint swan.

Now...

I invite him in.

I reject him.

I turn around innocently.

I got him back.

And now I try and do a balance to let him admire me.

It can take a while!

This is the last time he's going to try it.

And, no.

I check for the last time with Rothbart.

and he tells me, "Go on, finish it off."

And I go in for the kill.

Got him!

I do love Odile.

I'm not sure why, she's clearly not a very nice person.

Uh, I like her strength.

I like that she doesn't apologise for being good at what she does.

You know, she's going into someone else's kingdom,

and, somehow, she finds the courage within herself to go into

enemy territory and teach them a lesson.

She's a powerful lady. I like that.

Intoxicated by Odile, the Prince mounts his own bravura display

in front of the whole court.

But she trumps him with the flashiest moment of all -

a dazzling succession of turns, or fouettes.

This is an Italian party trick thrown into the mix

by the first Petersburg swan, Pierina Legnani.

Legnani was the first ballerina

to perform the unbelievable feat of 32 fouettes.

This is the most challenging step in the whole of Swan Lake.

Apparently to demonstrate her impeccable technique,

she took a rouble,

drew around it with a piece of chalk,

and promised that her feet would never leave that mark during

the 32 fouettes.

I wouldn't want to be challenged to that.

I absolutely love dancing Black Swan - she's just so much fun!

There's so much enjoyment - the pirouettes, the balances,

the travelling. And getting him and throwing him away.

The whole thing is fabulous and strong and beautiful.

And she wins. So, everyone likes a winner.

And it's in the music that Odile's triumph is depicted,

even stealing the White Swan's theme

at the moment the Prince pledges himself to the seductress.

The music is screaming at him. "Listen to the music, cloth ears!

"The music's telling you!"

But, of course, it doesn't work like that,

because Tchaikovsky's music works hand in hand with the dramatic plot.

There's such tension in the air. He drives the rhythm forward,

the melody forward, and it sounds happy, but isn't.

It's in the major key, which means the bitter sweet climax

to this act is that he has to take us...

..through bitterness...

..back to a resolution and a major key.

You wouldn't get that in ballet 50 years before.

The Sorcerer's coup de grace is to confront the Prince

with another vision of the White Swan tortured by his betrayal.

With this realisation, the Prince's whole world collapses.

Everything he sought is lost.

Ballet had achieved its epiphany.

Here was real psycho-sexual drama.

Petipa's courtly grace had fused with Ivanov's naturalism

to create a new dramatic language.

Set to Tchaikovsky's radical score,

the potential of dance leapt to new heights.

But how did this Imperial jewel of Tsarist Russia survive

the Soviet winter?

With the revolution, the bourgeois barriers were ripped down

and theatres opened to the masses.

Lenin's culture minister declaring that aristocratic arts

were the rightful inheritance of the workers.

Ballet, the military and sport

disciplined ranks of speechless citizens,

demonstrated collectivism at its finest.

For the soviet elite, an ignorance of ballet was an embarrassment,

Stalin declaring artists to be "engineers of the soul."

Swan Lake was Stalin's favourite ballet.

He saw it some 30 times, even the day before he died in 1953.

His successor, Khrushchev, complained that he'd seen

so many productions of Swan Lake that his dreams were haunted

by white tutus and tanks all mixed up together.

However, when the Bolshoi Ballet made their first ever visit

to Britain in 1956,

Khrushchev came, too, to show off Swan Lake as the Soviet ideal

What's more,

even when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,

the main television channel showed Swan Lake on a nonstop loop.

Swan Lake had become indestructible.

All classics survive because they have something to say

that is...

timeless.

And they also survive because they give actors, or dancers,

or musicians a challenge that keeps inspiring new talent to try

generation after generation, to bring something new

a new perspective,

something that no-one had seen before.

And Swan Lake really fits into that.

A point brilliantly proved in 1995 when one brave new production

did the unthinkable.

The idea really was to wipe away the image people had in their head

by casting the swans with male dancers.

It gave us great licence to create something new

I saw it much more as a psychological story through the Prince's eyes

and how his mind worked, rather than a literal fairy-tale.

If you're going to approach something like this

and do it in a different way, it's got to come from the source material

which is Tchaikovsky.

Like we reinterpret Shakespeare,

in many ways, the source material is so brilliant, i.e. the music,

that it can take many interpretations.

And, above all, it's the music, when switching between the extremes

of White and Black Swan, that helps me find the character.

As an actor, I guess you have to do one act of Juliet,

the first act of Juliet, the most innocent act of Juliet.

And then the Act II of Macbeth.

The real dark, dark side of Macbeth.

Um, those two things in one evening.

And then get back to Juliet for the end.

It's a story that we've heard so many times - the good and true girl

whose love is shattered by her boyfriend's disloyalty.

But for Odette, everything is lost.

I think that, by now, she has decided to die.

There is no future.

She doesn't want to continue to live this way.

And when the Prince realises that his act of betrayal

has locked her in a swan's body forever,

he runs back to plead forgiveness.

Of course, you feel for her.

I just don't ever want to be self-indulgent in it.

However much of a victim you are,

my nature is to fight.

So, for me, that's the hard part, that she doesn't fight,

that she takes it.

It doesn't mean I don't feel for her. I just want to shake her up

and say, "Do something!"

That said, what follows is one of the most beautiful scenes

in the ballet, where the heartbroken lovers are reunited

in a final pas de deux that echoes their first meeting.

When he first comes, you can hardly look at him.

You actually don't even want to look at him.

What he's doing

is the same step that you did in the pas de deux when you gave in.

It is like it would happen

-if you found your boyfriend cheating on you.

-Mm.

There is these two emotions -

you don't stop loving someone instantly,

even if they betray you.

You hate them and love them at the same time.

You want to leave them and the last thing you want is for them

to turn up at your house to say, "Sorry."

That's the last thing you want, right?

Once they're there, it's really hard.

It's better on the phone, or by text, thank you!

So, this is that moment.

You have to say to his face that you can't forgive him,

but, actually, you want to.

He's going to manipulate you,

he's going to remind you of the best moments.

Once again, we find ourselves at the beginning of everything.

How did the pas de deux start? Like that.

But this time you're not giving in.

You're closing yourself again.

So he walks around trying from another angle.

You still don't do it.

So, the third one, when you do do it, it means something.

It brings us back to the very first time you talk,

to the part where you met,

and that prepares for the last embrace.

Good.

Towards the end of the ballet, there's this very

unsettled accompaniment in the strings.

PLAYS NO. 28 SCENE

So there's nothing on the strong beat of the bar,

so it really unsettles you.

And, then, after one bar,

in comes the one thing you wouldn't expect to go

with a tormented accompaniment like that.

With Odette's forgiveness,

the lovers fight the Sorcerer to break the spell.

So, how on earth did we get from...

PLAYS SWAN THEME

..to this writhing mass of drama and tension?

Well, two hours ago, the world was a different place.

This is the final showdown, is the curse going to be released?

And Tchaikovsky's music

has encapsulated that sometimes by just using eight notes developed

with different accompaniments, different colours...

..but always without losing sight of the reason

two and a half hours ago our attention was grabbed.

MUSIC: Swan Lake, 29 Scene Finale by Tchaikovsky

Most people know Swan Lake as a tragedy where the lovers

can only find union in death.

Some productions see them live happily ever after.

Tragic or Hollywood, it always ends with

the destruction of Rothbart, the Sorcerer.

But the heart of the story remains unresolved.

So, beware. For every white swan out there, there remains a black swan

lurking in the shadows, tormenting the psyche of every honest prince.

So, what is it about Swan Lake?

Why are we still dancing it more than 100 years later?

It gives every generation a chance to bring into it

everything they have accumulated,

through the teaching of the masters,

but also through their new way of looking at the world.

There is a mystery about a swan-woman.

She's unobtainable, she's strange, she's precious,

we want to save her.

We want to be the prince that has the happy ending,

or the swan that finds the prince.