Courtesy CBC Television
Filmmaker Chelsea McMullan’s (Ever Deadly) beautifully filmed Swan Song captures the agonies and evolution of the final work of legendary dancer Karen Kain’s 50-year ballet career, her daring 2022 production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake for the National Ballet of Canada. Kain, who made her reputation in the 1970s performing with Rudolf Nureyev, not only experiments with a feminist reading of Swan Lake, but wrestles also with classical ballet’s historical erasures of ethnicity.
Swan Song presents three primary perspectives: Kain’s and those of principal dancer Jurgita Dronina and troubled corp de ballet member Shaelyn Estrada. Here are three generations of women in ballet, risking their own catastrophes: reputational, physical and psychological.
As archetypal as Tchaikovsky’s ballet is, McMullan’s film finds analogous framing in her portraits of Dronina and Estrada, with Estrada as shadow. Dronina recounts her narrow escape from the ashes of communism, where Estrada makes bracelets for herself which read “Marxist,” “Socialist,” “Libertarian” and “Slut.” The two are linked early in the film by a shot of a book Estrada is reading: Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class. Each is engaged in her own private struggle, and each keeps a secret that may undo her career.
This is an intimate, visceral film tightly focused on the physical intensities and breathtaking endurance of the performers. It is a film of individuals and relationships caught in a crucible of almost unbearable attention. And yet, they must endure. Bringing bodies to their limits for art, choreographer Robert Binet poses a crucial question: “What’s worth it, and what’s too much?” As the fraught deadline of opening night looms, there is genuine suspense.
At its best, Swan Song reminds one of the physicality, luminosity and darkness of Edgar Degas’ ballet paintings—Degas and Swan Lake are contemporaneous—and the cinematography directed by Tess Girard and Shady Hanna is stunning. Perhaps it under-utilizes the scholarly critical voices it introduces, but Swan Song is gritty, passionate and transcendent.
9
+ Intimacy; intensity
- Vanishing critics
Swan Song
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
Center for Contemporary Arts, NR, 100 mins
