The American Swan Lake Journey

Swan Lake has been performed throughout the world for more than a hundred years by major ballet companies and famous ballet dancers. It is a satisfying saga of love, longing, betrayal, death, and transcendence, brought to the stage with beautiful choreography and wonderful music. According to Juhasz, although companies have usually made changes to Petipa and Ivanov’s nineteenth-century choreography to suit the aesthetic of the time or a particular choreographer’s vision, all in all most versions continue to follow the original specifics and in spirit (54-83). Swan Lake is, after all, the classic of all classical ballets. The speed of the ballerina ranges from quick, moderate, slow, to stillness depending on the background music. At times, the …show more content…
Martha Graham's 1947 re-interpretation of the story of Oedipus and Jocasta, not only has some of the greatest choreography she ever produced, but also serves as a model of artistic collaboration ("Dance in Review" n.p.), Anguished, unable to prevent the unpreventable, the seven women are the essence of desperate energy, clawed furies rebounding from the floor to the score's insistent beat or digging deeper into that floor like human corkscrews. Here is the Graham idiom at its most percussive and virtuosic. Every breath pause in every body contraction is made kinetically apparent, and the ensuing release projection to carry the dramatic momentum forward ("Dance in Review" n.p.). The choreography's crucial double image is the embrace in which Jocasta, cross-legged on Oedipus's thighs, caresses her partner as if he were a baby. Thus wife-mother embraces her husband-son. Graham emphasized the idiom's shape and angular fluency. The effort of their dancing was deeply felt. Tiresias, the blind seer who reveals the couple's incest by dramatically cutting through the symbolic cord that binds them and this moment was gripping ("Dance in Review"