Not as impressive as it was advertised to be

Rating: 5/10 (12 March 2011)

I am a huge ballet aficionada and therefore I am very familiar of the story of Odette and Ziegfried (and I have no idea why she is called the Swan Queen in this rendition... most of my friends who are in ballet companies just simply call her Odette). First off, the crucial part of the story, Odile, is portrayed in a very different manner from what is generally accepted to be Tchaikovsky's premise (after all, he decided upon the story). She does not "become" a bird (in fact, Odile is never portrayed as a bird), so I found the transformation jarring.
As a performer myself, I have suffered a very similar predicament to what Nina has suffered; however, from what I have gathered about myself AND my fellow performers, the suffering is MUCH more agonising, more earthly, and extremely dirty even. We all have our fortes and our weaknesses; I cannot deliver Mendelssohn worth a pile of beans, while my Sibelius is relatively well delivered. There are times, however, when I must perform Mendelssohn, when I need to shape my psyche into that which fits the repertoire. Everyone has a different method; I read, my friend meditates, others go to the bar. But the suffering is internalised, not externalised, and therefore it rarely shows upon our faces. We carry on with our daily regimen, we practice, we practice, and we practice more.
The path to art is nothing like which is depicted here. It is a solitary confinement within yourself, and hardly nothing is externalised; when you externalise (by crying, for instance), you release the emotion and then it is gone. We pent it up until we are about to burst, and then we channel it through our performances.
This is a good entertainment for the general population, but it does not depict the sufferance of the artists well enough in my opinion.
A very good performance of Odette by Gillian Murphy of the American Ballet Company is available on DVD. I had hoped for a little higher-quality ballet performance.