Svansjön

When Mats Ek talks about Swan Lake – he first talks about Tchaikovsky’s music, which he believes is the most important reason for the work’s survival. “Someone has said that Tchaikovsky’s music is like flowers, but not like seeds,” he says. But those flowers are rooted in a great sadness, in a longing, and in a wild and almost desperate exhilaration, which makes the flowers seductive and dangerous.

Tchaikovsky was burnt out early on by internal misfortune. He was an outsider. He was homosexual in a society where the death penalty was punished, he lived unhappily for a time in a white marriage with one of his students, but the actual relationship was established with an older woman in another country. They never met.

With Swan Lake, Mats Ek returned to the Romantic ballet repertoire – and as with his previous interpretations of classics; with a great willfulness, which he does not want to be perceived as a polemic against the original works. Instead, he wants to find the emotions and complications that can be found in the bound form and period expression of the fairy tale.

“The fairy tale with the prince, the black and the white swan, the mother and the magician is quite unclear,” says Mats Ek. In different performances, it often has different endings – everyone drowns, or the prince gets away with the sheer horror, or the wizard is defeated and the ending is a real happy ending.

In Mats Ek’s version, Swan Lake became a story about a development with obstacles, about a break-up that becomes too difficult to be completed. The prince is horrified by the world he encounters, which threatens his dream of purity. He seeks his way back to Swan Lake, an inner exile. It can become a new starting point by the water among the animals.

the Place by Ana Laguna, Mats Ek Överbord by Ana Laguna, Mats Ek Spöksonaten by Mats Ek Prometheus by Cullberg Ballet Juliet & Romeo by Mats Ek Evidentia by Mats Ek