A love story in black and white

Love, lies and heartbreak will haunt the Sacramento Ballet’s upcoming production of Swan Lake opening Thursday, March 26. Tchaikovsky, who wrote this as his first ballet score, died thinking it a failure because of its first disastrous production in 1877. A reworking by choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov—whose 1895 re-imagining of the ballet has inspired Sacramento Ballet artistic directors Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda’s choreography—resurrected the dance. Now, it is considered probably the greatest ballet of all time.

Every ballerina grows up wanting to dance the roles of the White Swan Queen, Odette, and the Black Swan, Odile, two creatures as different as night and day. So says Alexandra Cunningham, who gets her shot at the demanding roles. She follows in the footsteps—en pointe—of such ballerinas as Margot Fonteyn, Nina Baratova and her mother, Binda. Binda even served as Rudolf Nureyev’s ballet mistress, rehearsing and coaching the company when that quintessential Prince Siegfried and the Boston Ballet toured a production internationally in the early 1980s.

This weekend’s run of Swan Lake will be the company’s first performance of the ballet in 15 years. “It’s something we don’t bring out often, obviously, because it’s a huge undertaking,” Ron Cunningham said. The ballet calls for 18 dancer-swans rising from fog—and that’s just one scene in the four-act tale.

The story, simply put, is this: On his 21st birthday, Prince Siegfried goes hunting with some buddies and aims to shoot a swan, which turns out to be the beautiful Odette, condemned by the evil sorcerer Von Rothbart to swandom in the daytime, only allowing her to be human at night. Only a virgin prince can break the spell—and guess what? Yes, he is. Boy falls in love, gets duped by another of Von Rothbart’s tricks and loses the girl, but not for want of trying to win her back. It’s a story of love, loss, and redemption but (spoiler alert!) his (and her) happiness can only come in the afterlife.