It’s strange to go to New York’s Lincoln Center as my phone buzzes every fifteen minutes with news of some crucial governmental function being dismantled or handed to oligarchs. Lincoln Center is itself a government edifice, a Cold War-funded, planned city space intended to tacitly compete with the raked stages of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi. The choreographer and NYCB founder George Balanchine himself was sent on tour by the US State Department. Balanchine extensions, signature legs in the air, have an extremity their Russian counterparts lack. He choreographs often in twelve counts, setting difficult counters to the beat, and his footwork is so fast it’s often cited as a stand in-for all of American post-War modernity, all that Jackson Pollock car crash of culture at speed. The coterie within the State Department that saw the cultural value in funding Ab-Ex art, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and, yes, the New York City Ballet, was a small post-War blip.

If the entire apparatus of the arts in America collapses while I’m sitting in my third-tier balcony seat, I won’t know it until after the show. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is supposedly now only funding America-themed agitprop. I turn off my phone. For the record, ballet has been mostly hung out to dry by the US government for the last couple of decades anyway. NEA grants, always sparse, have never kept up with inflation, even during the Obama and Biden administrations. Many major ballet companies, the NYCB included, are mostly funded by private donors, and the cash cow of The Nutcracker season. It’s a long way from the Cold War. Maybe American governments can only be compelled to care about arts and culture – when they still care about soft power.

Swan Lake is a story ballet, atypical for the NYCB repertoire. It was choreographed by Peter Martins for the company beginning in 1999 after Balanchine’s death. Martins, after a string of serious sexual harassment allegations brought in court against the company, resigned in 2017. There are accounts of him beating his female partners, many of them also dancers, including an anecdote of him pushing his then-wife down the stairs. An internal investigation cleared him, but either way, I don’t think ours is a country that cares about wife-beating anymore, nor about the idea of sexual harassment. For about ten minutes it mattered. It takes even longer in the sometimes-insular world of ballet to get these things to matter, and now I’m not sure they even do anymore. It’s very Swan Lake, getting pushed down the stairs by a supposed lover.

Principal Dancers Tyler Angle and Sara Mearns

Principal Dancers Tyler Angle and Sara Mearns

In Swan Lake, power is cruel, absolute, and arbitrary. A princess named Odette is turned by an evil enchanter into a swan. To break Rothbart’s curse, she must receive a true pledge of undying love. A prince name Siegfried falls in love with her. But her enemy, the black Swan Odile, daughter of the very same evil enchanter, seduces the prince away at the last minute, while disguised as Odette. Odile and Odette are portrayed by the same principal dancer, in one of the hardest roles in the classical canon. It’s considered more fun to dance Odile. Her final variation, triumphant, traditionally ends with thirty-two fouetté turns. These require that the leg whips around for momentum, extending to straight from bent to the knee with each rotation up on the pointe shoe. Audiences have been known to count them, seeing them as a demonstration of absolute mastery. After dancing for approximately two and half hours, even the most seasoned calves burn doing the fouettés. In that moment, though, the principal is no innocent: Her agency radiates with each quick rotation, all muscle – even as proxy, even just once – and in control of her world, the stage-world that stands in for ours. Interestingly, the NYCB-Martins version in use tonight substitutes only sixteen fouettés and then adds a series of rapid chaîne turns – linked rotations on two feet so fast you can barely spot the dancer whipping her head around to spot.

After Siegfried defeats Rothbart, Odette throws herself off a cliff; or, in this version, walks into the ambiguous death-light of the stage wing. The thing about these new versions of ballets blancs, those pavlovas of Russian platter-tutu meringue with American stylistic berries on top, is that they almost always end tragically. Swan Lake is so Russian that it ran 24/7 as filler Russian television during the confused fall of the Soviet Union, because whoever was in charge was so sure it would be a safe choice no matter what followed. Pavlova is named for Anna – herself a turn-of-the-century prima ballerina, herself very Russian. This Swan Lake, in this moment, in this building, by this company that was the pinnacle of the US post-War cultural prestige project, feels, paradoxically, profoundly American. It’s about to beautifully throw itself into the light; it sees it coming and has one last, aching variation left.

Tonight (19 February), Odile/Odette is danced by Sara Mearns, in one of her signature roles. Martins’s choreography is frenetic, almost anxiety-inducing much of the time, but Mearns manages to make it look angular, sculptural, and intentional. In the NYCB Swan Lake, there is no attitude untaken, no jump without extra beats, no sharp diagonal excluded for organic flocking. As the Jester, Daniel Ulbricht makes these choices look equally natural, with bravura flourishes instead of frantic additions, and is a welcome presence on the stage, in a full-body costume that calls back to painter and scenographer Léon Bakst’s patterns for the Ballets Russes. All the costumes for this production are mid-century jewel tones, which, against the scenery designed by Danish painter Per Kirkeby, gesture toward the stroke of the brush as the semi-abstract evocation of landscape – again, a post-War moment. Altogether, this Swan Lake is very self-consciously constructed against late 20th-century conceptions of visual modernity, in the dancers’ lines as much as the setting’s.

New York City Ballet’s production of Peter Martins’s Swan Lake

If the production is a call to the past, the corps de ballet dancers themselves evoke NYCB’s future under its new leadership. From the corps dancing soloist roles on top of the rest of the ballet, Jenelle Manzi and India Bradley stand out. Manzi’s lightness and delicacy of touch, coupled with Bradley’s supernatural ability to make her pointe shoes seem like a natural extension of her body, speak to the endurance of Balanchine training and execution in ballet writ-large. Dancers like Manzi and Bradley represent a new, post-Martins, post-scandal future that perhaps tentatively suggests a new culture is emerging. Both, though, share with Mearns that essential Balanchine extremity, the push against the soft curve of the body that Americanizes the Russian ballet for the new century, and the one after that.

The NYCB-Martins Swan Lake is, in the end, all unexpected angles, wrists bent with severity against a mostly straight épaulement, the upper body held at linear command. It’s sharper than a true-Russian style’s soft arms, gently inclined at the elbows, and delicate Vaganova fingers. This Swan Lake cuts; it’s a satin ribbon, burnt with a bodega lighter at the end to keep it from fraying, tucked into the knot at the lee of the city’s post-certainty ankle, like the anchor for a pointe shoe. The world collapses, Odette dies ambiguously every night on stage. My phone buzzes again, liberated from the theatre to tell me more terrible things. I tentatively relevé in the plaza, testing my injured right foot. Some things persist despite, stubborn, always; I still have ballet class tomorrow.

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Peter Martins’s Swan Lake
NYCB, Lincoln Center
19 Feb – 2 Mar 2023