NO MIST, NO MERCY, JUST SWAN LAKE
Forget what you think Swan Lake is. Forget the gauzy tragedy, the white tutus, the endless fluttering. At Segerstrom Hall tonight, Miami City Ballet, under Alexei Ratmansky‘s choreography, has cracked open the windows. Something sharper moves through the air now.
The story’s cruelty remains intact. It is a particularly Russian cruelty, born from the suffocating marriage politics of the Czarist Romanov court. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia for three centuries, presiding over a rigid autocracy where aristocratic marriages served as tools of political alliance rather than personal choice. Every noble union required imperial approval, binding families into webs of obligation that prioritized state power over individual will. This wasn’t mere backdrop; it was a system that devoured individual agency. Against this historical reality, the ballet’s opening crisis takes on dreadful urgency.
Katia Carranza and Renan Cerdeiro
Prince Siegfried learns he must choose a bride. The decree falls like a blade sharpened on centuries of dynastic obligation. This is no fairy tale romance. It is the brutal mathematics of imperial succession, where personal desire vanishes before state necessity.
Katia Carranza and Renan Cerdeirov
He flees to the forest, not seeking love but gasping for air. The palace has become a gilded cage. There, under moonlight that refuses sentiment and offers clarity instead of comfort, he encounters Odette, the Swan Queen. She exists in the space between certainties: woman and not woman, swan and not swan. The curse splits her cleanly. Daylight forces feathers, night returns flesh. Freedom demands an oath of love held without fracture, the kind of impossible fidelity that destroyed so many in the Russian court.
Then Von Rothbart, the evil sorcerer who cursed Odette, arrives in a ballroom thick with expectation. Beside him stands Odile, the black swan, designed as Odette’s perfect double. Siegfried’s eyes fail him. They must. They always have, when aristocrats mistake performance for truth. Siegfried pledges to the imposter. The spell snaps shut. Odette plunges into the lake. Siegfried follows. End.
Ratmansky strips away traditional Russian ballet’s fondness for spectacle, refusing the decorative impulse that once masked ballet’s harder truths. What emerges is a study in cause, effect, and consequence, a clear-eyed examination of power that Chekhov might recognize.
Each gesture carries weight. Where other productions blur their swans into shimmer, these dancers land with intention. They breathe in patterns that suggest unity but stop short of robotic precision. When they circle Odette, they form a fortress rather than an ornament. Protection arrives as a choice.
Statuesque, with the ineffable poise of a true prima ballerina. Dawn Atkins refuses the fragility Russian ballet once demanded of its ballerinas. That porcelain perfection broke so many dancers in service to imperial fantasy. As Odette, her lines bend but do not break. She becomes a real person caught in an impossible situation, not just a symbol of tragic femininity. From her first encounter with Siegfried, the emotional charge is unmistakable. It doesn’t feel staged. It feels like recognition.
Stanislav Olshanskyi, a great example of the danseur noble tradition, brings haunted nobility to Siegfried. The role is so often reduced to decorative chivalry, but Olshanskyi offers something more interior: his first touch hovers rather than claims. He waits. He listens. Masculinity becomes an act of restraint rather than reach. Together, he and Atkins are performers anointed with a confidence so natural it begins to feel mythic. They are not pretending to be perfect. They simply are.
Benno, the prince’s sidekick (a self-assured Damián Zamorano), emerges not as comic relief or courtly filler, but as an emotional conduit. His loyalty to Siegfried is palpable, his care for Odette measured and real. He catches her when she falters. He echoes Siegfried’s phrasing without ever stealing focus. He becomes a third voice in their duet, a subtle kind of triangle built on attention rather than jealousy, suggesting a model of mutual care that the imperial court could never imagine.
Hannah Fischer, as the Queen Mother, radiates imperial force without flattening into stereotype. There’s real weight to her presence, a sovereign certainty that makes Siegfried’s crisis all the more wrenching. And Cameron Catazzaro‘s Von Rothbart avoids cartoon villainy entirely. He’s not twirling his mustache. He’s strategizing. His presence in Odette and Odile’s lives is chilling precisely because it is so plausible: control cloaked in sophistication, violence behind velvet.
Jérôme Kaplan‘s costume design deepens this approach. Convention might dress Benno in stark black as a foil to Siegfried’s white-and-silver regalia. Kaplan chooses deep navy trimmed with gold. The binaries fall away, replaced by a spectrum of nobility that makes masculine alliance something more complicated and interesting.
Historical precision guides both visual transformation and choreographic philosophy. Kaplan rejects the easy oppositions traditional productions embrace. The Queen and her courtiers wear period-accurate gowns that evoke the 1870s Russian court. Alexander II’s reforms had begun, but the palace had not changed.
Odette wears a crown instead of feathers. Her hair flows soft and womanly rather than birdlike. The tutus follow bell-shaped silhouettes instead of stiff plates jutting from the hips. These choices restore the 1895 aesthetic, known for its Romantic elegance and expressive silhouettes, while emphasizing Odette’s humanity. Her transformation becomes personal rather than avian. These are living garments that move and resist sentimentality.
In the ballroom, long gowns with open sleeves allow natural gesture. This was scandalous by court standards, where every movement was prescribed and etiquette ruled the air.
Act I’s peasants wear pastels and carry flower baskets. This represents Russian aristocracy’s dream of folk culture, carefully curated and safely distant from the real thing.
The maypole sequence proves the showstopper. Dancers weave ribbons around a wooden pole while formations shift from intimate clusters into sweeping circles. The choreography captures what the court craved: folk culture sanitized for aristocrats, beautiful enough to seem real yet distant enough to keep hands clean. It offers a moment of idealized joy before darkness returns, as it did to the empire.
Renan Cerdeiro and Katia Carranza
Odile arrives without fanfare, draped in green and violet that shimmers with an iridescence once reserved for the court’s most opulent silks. These are expensive dyes reserved for the elite. She embodies wealth and artifice. Dawn Atkins transforms completely in the role of Odile. Where Odette bore genuine feeling, Odile radiates calculation. She doesn’t seduce but simply exists as authority incarnate, with perfect understanding of power’s machinery.
Then comes the sequence: thirty-two fouettés en tournant, ballet’s most notorious technical challenge. Here, they’re spun with merciless clarity. They serve not as bravura but as statement, as mastery, as moral force. Each turn declares: I am in control. I can do the impossible. That is what power demands.
Mark Stanley‘s scenic and lighting design builds architecture for emotion rather than reproduction. The mountains suggest Russia’s vastness: beautiful, endless, unconquerable. Transitions move like history, scaled for impact, never cluttered.
Lighting sculpts the air around Odette’s isolation, around the unity of the corps, around time itself. It avoids the mechanical exactness of palace clocks. It follows the dancers and listens.
Moments of beauty emerge from this discipline. Swans return in asymmetric groupings, some black, some white. Their patterns shift with breath rather than gridlines. They no longer encircle Odette but stand nearby. She chooses. A small revolution the empire never allowed.
The story ends without edits or redemption. Odette jumps. Siegfried follows. Silence.
The music listens too. Tchaikovsky’s score, born during Russia’s search for national sound, finds its weight here. The composer wrote Swan Lake in 1875, when the empire was desperately trying to forge a musical identity that could rival Western Europe while remaining distinctly Russian. That tension between aspiration and authenticity runs through every measure. Under Gary Sheldon‘s baton, the Pacific Symphony serves the dancers rather than overwhelming them. It supports and shadows but never shouts. The orchestration breathes with the corps, swells with Odette’s despair, turns metallic during Odile’s deception. This isn’t the bombastic Tchaikovsky of concert halls but something more intimate, something that remembers it was written for bodies moving through space, for a story that ends in drowning.
What lingers is clarity rather than heartbreak. Every shape speaks its truth, something court life smothered but this production restores. Even the arabesque, ballet’s most iconic pose, empties itself of show.
When Odile holds the line, releases her partner’s hand, presses her palm to his knee, this is intention rather than decoration.
This is Swan Lake without illusion, without lies, without easy distance from pain.
I did not leave uplifted. I left alert, the way I do after reading Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Beautiful art can contain unbearable truths. Ratmansky knows this is no fairy tale but a mirror held to power’s face. Look closely. The reflection does not flatter.
previous production photos by Alexander Iziliaev
Swan Lake
Miami City Ballet
with Pacific Symphony
Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa
double-cast; reviewed on June 20
ends on January 22, 2025
for tickets, visit Segerstrom
