A note from a Tuesday night with the swans of Hyde Park
Before I went, my musician friends tried to spare me: The technique might not be there. You know what Swan Lake demands. You love Tchaikovsky fine and don’t go and disappoint yourself.
But I went anyway. Well I had to — I take ballet courses at the University — which is to say, badly and with great affection — half the swans on that stage were people I know. People I’ve stretched next to at the barre, people who borrowed me their bobby pins. They studied for midterms last week and then, somehow, also learned to be a corps. And I know was never going to be about technique.
Swan Lake is a cathedral. Tchaikovsky’s score alone could keep a person busy for a lifetime — I can go on and on — the orchestra, the conductor, the costumes, the staging, the choreography, the casting, the temperature of the room, the way the audience breathes. To demand perfection from any Swan Lake is to misunderstand what kind of object it is. Even at the Bolshoi, on the right night and with the wrong light, something will go astray. And to demand it of UChicago undergraduates a week after midterms? Huh.
Imperfection does not diminish the magic. Sometimes it is the very conduit: The word amateur comes from the Latin amator — lover. The audience that night was amateur in the truest sense: roommates, lab partners, the boy from 1 year Calc III who came because his crush is dancing the petite little swan. They cheered and clapped through the music, drowning the strings, and I have never been more certain that this was as it should be.
Yeah maybe the Black Swan didn’t land every turn and the swan waltz wasn’t aligned to a ruler. None of it mattered. What mattered was that for many people in that theater, this was their first ballet — not their last. I can already see the rest of the story. A few years from now, one of us somewhere in another city will scroll past an ad for a professional Swan Lake on a Saturday night and think: let’s do this instead of the bar. A seed planted in a college auditorium. The pleasure of the evening was never in the precision; it was in the attempt — in the love that fills a room when amateurs (lovers, lovers, lovers) put on the costume of a story far bigger than they are and try, for one night, to hold it.