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SWAN SONG (2024) Director: Chelsea McMullan MPAA Rating: Running Time: 1:40 Release Date: 7/26/24 (limited; digital & on-demand) |
Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2024 "I love ballet, and sometimes, it doesn't feel like it loves me back," says Shaelynn Estrada, a member of the dancing corps of the National Ballet of Canada, at one point in Swan Song. That gets at the heart of director Chelsea McMullan's documentary, which follows the company's 2022 production of Swan Lake from its failed first attempt, stopped before it even started because of the COVID-19 pandemic, to the show's opening night. Dance like this can be beautiful, but behind the scenes, the effort of getting to that point amounts to a lot of discomfort, pain, and worries that everything going wrong in rehearsal will carry through to an audience of a couple thousand people. These dancers, as well as the people staging the production, keep going, though, in spite or because of how difficult the work is. We might not get a full or extensive view of the final result itself in this film, although the show's director insists that everything went right, but that doesn't matter here. After all, this isn't about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's famous ballet, which is performed with so much regularity that even the National Ballet has another go at it scheduled for next year. Maybe a sequel, showing us what has changed or hasn't for the assorted dancers highlighted in the documentary, is in order. We do get to know a handful of the people working on or performing in the show with some degree of intimacy. At the head of the production is Karen Kain, who started with the National Ballet at the age of 18, caught a lucky break—unlucky for another dancer, which is the way things often go—that may have hastened her career success, and performed with some regularity for almost three decades. At the start of the narrative, Kain has been the artistic director of the National Ballet for 15 years and is preparing to retire. Appropriately, she decides her swan song will be to direct Swan Lake, the first time she would be directly staging a production, but just as the talk begins, the pandemic strikes. Kain delays her retirement until the company, now even more in debt because of the absence of revenue from performances, can get back to work. McMullan and the crew seem to have been provided complete access to production, and they take full advantage of that (more than we see here, apparently, since the film was edited from a four-part television series that is only available in Canada). Kain is the primary focus at first, since this is her show and the culmination of a career of more than half a century in ballet. Her past successes are shown by way of archival footage, including her performing the principal roles in Tchaikovsky's most famous of ballets. The most attention, though, is paid to the dancers of this production, who understand what this means to Kain but don't have the time or luxury to sympathize with their director's vision for the show or her nostalgic sense of bringing a life in dance full circle. The work is simply too physically and mentally demanding for such lofty ideas. Dancing the two lead roles—of Princess Odette, who is turned into a swan, and Odile, the Black Swan made to look like the princess by her magician father—is Jurgita Dronina, a Russian ballerina whose career thus far slightly mirrors Kain's own. Dronina is almost as famous as Kain was during her heyday, and everyone admires her dedication, with choreographer Robert Binet recalling a story of the dancer making two trans-Atlantic flights over the course of three days to perform in three different productions. However, Dronina has a secret. She has been dealing with a nerve injury for years now, and on top of that, the principal dancer has one way of performing, while the director wants something different from her. They never clash, but the question of whether or not Dronina will perform the roles becomes a major one here. If she doesn't, the ballerina decides this might be the end of her dancing career. The other key figure is Estrada, a member of the ballet corps. Those dancers are vital to any production of Swan Lake—a fact repeated by Kain, Binet, a ballet scholar, and a dance critic, whose ultimate thoughts on the production are never revealed (The reviews, apparently, were mixed, so that could be why). The demands, simply during the rehearsal process, are overwhelming, too. We watch as they repeat sections of choreography over and over again, and just when things seem to settle into some comfort zone, something comes up to throw away all that progress. The elaborate costumes, for example, become tripping hazards, and then, there's the set, with its jagged design that looks as if certain backdrops could impale a stray dancer. Estrada has dreams of becoming a principal dancer, obviously, but issues with depression and self-esteem keep arising. The film may only allow room for select points of focus among the cast and crew, but McMullan has chosen correctly. There's a span of experience and accomplishment within the interview subjects that provides a fine snapshot of the practical realities of a career in ballet. It seems almost impossible in the big picture and beyond difficult within the scope of a single show. The dancers in Swan Song keep going, though—not because they want to, but because they need to. They love it to their core, as grueling and punishing as it may be, and that contradictory relationship comes through in this film. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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