‘Swan Song’ Review: Ballet Doc Raises Karen Kain, Her Dancers and the Bar on Performance Arts Films
A luminous technique defines the documentary “Swan Song” as it unfurls its saga of famed ballerina Karen Kain’s final act as artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada: the helming of a new production of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” Kain had never directed a ballet. So, although it might not seem like a high-art kind of word, let’s just say she picked a doozy. While archival images of her own performances underscore that, as one of Canada’s most celebrated ballerinas, Kain’s timing was impeccable, the timing of her maiden directing venture was less so. Kain had planned to retire after the world premiere of the ballet set for 2020. A global pandemic pushed the premiere two years.
Director Chelsea McMullan, along with co-writer and producer Sean O’Neill, have crafted a work that echoes the artform’s grace and rigor, physical demands and details. As one of the film’s achingly sympathetic subjects Shaelynn Estrada confesses, it also explores the deep love and sometimes equally deep antipathy dancers can have for their chosen profession.
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“Swan Song” begins on opening night. It then loops back to how that hard-won night came to be. Before the title sequence, the cameras capture pre-curtain bustle. Two dancers put on their makeup. A ballerina in a black tutu rushes down a hallway, patrons stream into the concert hall and Kain and her husband, Ross Petty, take seats above the fray. The pristinely edited sequence (by Brendan Mills) has a nervous energy, approximating visually the off-key tuning up of an orchestra and the buzz of the audience. Cinematographers Tess Girard’s and Shady Hanna’s cameras (they used two throughout the shoot and eight on opening night) deliver moments that can be fluid or jaggy, intimate or at a respectful remove.
Kain’s breakthrough performance was in “Swan Lake,” which she last danced in 1994. Along the way to an acclaimed career, she was aided by Rudolph Nureyev and painted by Andy Warhol. For a former prima ballerina, she never comes across as a prima donna. The stakes are perhaps too high for that. During the film’s interviews, she often beams, and her reminiscences charm with more amused wonder than self-satisfaction. But her visage turns pensive, quietly dissatisfied when the ballet is not gelling.
When the company is finally able to begin rehearsals, it’s been two years. That Kain’s hair is longer serves as a reminder of the pandemic. “There’s ‘Swan Lakes’ all over the world and they’re danced beautifully,” she says. “But I’m tired of looking at things that are academic exercises. I want to be moved, you know? … I want to cry.” That, too, feels like a reminder.
Not only do signs of COVID’s presence persist (often in the on-and-off-again presence of masks), so do 2020’s calls for social justice. Midway through the film, a BIPOC corps de ballet member pushes for the production to abandon the traditional white tights, a request Kain embraces.
To direct the enterprise, Kain chose Robert Binet as the production’s choreographer. (In a review of the show, Kain and Christopher Stowell are also credited.) He’s a bit of an ungainly swan himself, with a speaking voice that seems at times to be holding back a nervous laugh. He also exudes a kindness — and youth, which is part of the reason Kain was keen to work with him.
Early in this cinéma-vérité-minded gem, Estrada, the 19-year-old from Texas (“not white trash, but eggshell”), is making her bed. “My therapist says I have to do it,” she reports in that casual-not-casual way the young can have: revealing and reveling a bit in their pain.
If Estrada’s doubts and bouts of anguish are emotional, principal dancer Jurgita Dronina’s primary challenges are physical. The Russian-Lithuanian dancer has an injury for which the treatment may render her unable to perform the roles of Odette/Odile. But she’s tough and “Swan Song” serves as a reminder that ballet can vie with any contact sport for degree of difficulty.
A few times, it appears that Kain and her star Dronina might not share the same creative language. It’s a relief that McMullan and O’Neill don’t gin up that potential tension. There’s enough psychic and physical stress in the work of making “Swan Lake” to go around without pulling on what could have been an easy narrative thread.
One of the documentary’s executive producers may stand out for viewers. Neve Campbell trained at the National Ballet’s school and then danced with the company before embarking on her television and film career. The care the filmmakers take in representing the essential role of the corps de ballet — the swans — recalls one of the star’s films: “The Company,” Robert Altman’s 2003 feature about the Joffrey Ballet.
Of the many gifts offered by “Swan Song” is that it expands even further the notion of “company,” consistently offering subtle yet intentional glimpses of the people laboring to make Kain’s “Swan Lake” special, to support the artists and the art: from the wig master to the costume designer, the security guards to the physical therapists. And then there are family members, too: here, that means Dronina’s husband and young son, as well as Estrada’s girlfriend.
The film has a few seeming endings, which feels like a bonus. A personal favorite features Estrada walking down a hallway, still harboring ambitions to be a principal someday, still nursing a sense of what ballet means to her. “Ballet is punk rock as fuck,” she summarizes. And then there’s something of a coda with Kain gently waxing — or is it waning? — nostalgic. And why not? It is her swan song after all.
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