The classical repertory is a never-ending temptation for ballet choreographers to revise to suit their visions. But something fetid happens when updating “Swan Lake,” to Peter Tchaikovsky’s 19th century musical masterpiece.
The rare successes notwithstanding (think Matthew Bourne’s male swans), each succeeding generation aims low, then sinks lower. The shock values pile up for no purpose other than their own sake.
And so this weekend at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, we had “Lac,” Jean-Christophe Maillot’s 2011 production with an unrelentingly nasty story dreamed up by Maillot and French author Jean Rouaud. They give us marital infidelity, incest and double murder via an unpleasant royal family, its over-sexed friends, thuggish swans, two ghoulish porters and Her Majesty of the Night, who has an oral fixation that makes Miley Cyrus look like a teething babe. Added to that is a crude introductory film prelude and a chopped up and rearranged Tchaikovsky recording.
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This disappointment was all the more painful because the dancers in Maillot’s company, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, are fantastic performers. Explosive and expressive, light and lightning fast, they shifted from one fully articulated movement to the next with ease and precision. Yet, as gorgeous as they were, they were unable to redeem the crassness. They did exude a pure joy in the act of dancing, and that was the value to retrieve from this two-act, 2.5-hour production.