Conversation with Bruce Simpson is an adventure. I imagine this is what it was like before catch-phrase television and films and 24-hour headline channels taught us to speak and think in sound bytes. Bruce and I talked about the weather in Scotland and his hometown
of Glasgow and his thoughts on literature, specifically Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. We talked about shuffle dancing and the effect thirty years in South Africa has had on his life. Then we talked about the Louisville Ballet’s production of the Tchaikovsky/Petipa/Ivanov/Dunner/Simpson version of Swan Lake – an interpretation that is a return to nineteenth century Classicism: the reflection of a world of moral absolutes, betrayal and redemption.
BS: If you talk to an orchestral musician, he or she is going tell you that of the three great classical ballets of Tchaikovsky – Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty – the best music is in The Nutcracker. If you talk with a ballet classicist, you’ll hear that Sleeping Beauty is the purist of the three. For me, however, Swan Lake is really extraordinary because it’s the most symphonic of the three. The way he changes the key from major to minor between the acts to stabilize the different emotions of the various atmospheres has always attracted me as a dancer, even when I was in the corps de ballet. I always knew when I was up there doing Sleeping Beauty that I was practicing my art form at the absolute top end of what I was capable of. It’s purity in classical ballet – its mannerisms have to be totally clean, like Mozart or Bach. There’s very little room for idio- syncrasies. Swan Lake, on the other hand, is more emotional. As a dancer, I always loved doing Swan Lake. I have the body of a long distance runner, so I was never 100% comfortable in ballets that lasted fifteen minutes. I was more comfortable and did far better work in the big monsters like Romeo and Juliet or Spartacus. For me, Swan Lake was to make the music visible.
SD: What does that mean?
BS: The interpretation of the choreography by the dancer, including his or her facial expressions must match the musical intent of the score. For example, it doesn’t really work if you have a dancer beaming with a wide smile while dancing to a melancholy piece of music. What I love about Swan Lake is that from the very moments of the first bars right through to the very end, there was a line of development – a line I could follow musically that helped support me in telling the audience what I wanted to say as an artist. It’s like The Nutcracker: There are so many versions of it, but we have to understand in classical ballet today that you have to approach it in terms of the social norms of the time in which we live now.
SD: For example?
BS: We have to remember those ballets were created by Petipa at the Marynsky in the time of the Russian Czars. Therefore, they were basically entertainment for the aristocracy. If, in a Russian winter, you had to trudge through three feet of snow for two hours to get into town, you might be quite happy sitting in the theatre watching a ballet for four hours. There was nothing else to do. Today, with the pressures that people have, we find that Friday evening is one of our most challenging performances in terms of audience.
SD: Why do you think that is?
BS: Because people have very high expectations of their weekend. They race home from work on a Friday, get the babysitter, eat dinner, go back downtown to The Kentucky Center by 8 p.m.; and they’ve got to be home by 11 or the babysitter is going to charge more. So when a ballet company approaches a version of Swan Lake, the reality is that it must be paced much faster. One of Petipa’s great ballets is Le Bayadère, which is almost never done in the United States because it’s enormous and expensive to do. Originally, it was over four hours long. I did a production in Hong Kong in 2000 in which we cut about 20 minutes out of the first act with no loss of quality.
SD: Is that easy to do?
BS:No, you have to be very, very careful. The gentleman responsible for the editing of the music for us was Francis Rainey. He had been the conductor of the Stuttgart Ballet for fifteen years under John Cranko, and he conducted a great number of our big ballets in Johannesburg. With that experience, when I was asked to do Swan Lake for the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet in 2001, the first person I looked at to help me with the score was Francis Rainey. We spent a lot of time going through to see what we could eliminate without disturbing the lyricism and the power of Act IV in particular.
SD: Was it an easy partnership?
BS: Well, I wanted to do certain things and he said, “That’s a great idea but the key change is really bad and to the ear, it won’t sound right.” There were those sorts of conversations. I don’t think people really understand what we mean in the ballet world by “cutting” something.
SD: Can you make it clearer?
BS: In The Nutcracker during “Waltz of the Flowers,” there are thirty-two bars and a repeat of the same thirty-two bars. You can safely take out that repeat without damaging the integrity of the music. We went through the whole of Swan Lake to get it down to about two-and-a-quarter hours.
SD: So that you’re getting people home before the babysitter’s overtime begins.
BS: Exactly. We can also make a difference in the way we cast the ballet. If you are careful in casting, there is time at the end of Act I for the girls who are peasants to change quickly into swans. By doing that, you can go directly into Act II with a scenic change and no intermission. From a dramatic point of view, a great deal also depends on the number of dancers available. In Act III, for example, there is a lot of divertissement and much of the grandeur depends on numbers. If you have the Czardas with only two couples, it looks diminished. As an artistic director, you then make choices: which divertissement do you do and in which order?
SD: So you can play with that?
BS: You can play with that without disturbing the integrity of the Act…the music’s still there. It’s supposed to look like a royal palace celebrating the prince’s twenty-first birthday.
SD: It has to be big.
BS: It has to be big and we have only 28 contracted dancers in this company. An important part of the whole equation is how you define “choreographer.” In my view, a choreographer is a person with an original idea, an original voice and an original vocabulary in the way he/she organizes the human body in space to the music. The choreographer for Swan Lake was Petipa and his great ballet master Ivanov, who did Acts II & IV. In actual fact, Ivanov was responsible for all the choreography with the swans. They collaborated over Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and others. Ivanov was a great lyricist. He was the first ballet master to truly organize the corps de ballet – that is, doing the same steps at the same time, with the same arms and the same angle of head so they had a uniform look. So, am I the choreographer? No – it’s like me directing a Shakespeare play. The script is there, the foundation is there, the story is there, the style is there. How I direct that version of the material is my personal view of it. For example, in Act II of Swan Lake we have a certain number of swans in the corps de ballet. The question for me is, do you have 12, 16, 24, 32, 48? You have to have equal numbers.
SD: Do you get to decide the ending?
BS: I think my big question about Swan Lake over the years was always in the drama of Act IV: Either they die and go to heaven, or they’re saved by their love. The great classical ballets survive because they are all about one human emotion. Whether you speak French, Italian, German or Korean; whether you’re four, sixteen, fifty-eight or sixty-eight, you can understand that one emotion. For instance, Sleeping Beauty is about the triumph of good over evil; Swan Lake is about betrayal. In Swan Lake, I always felt that the consequences of the betrayal in Act III had gotten lost – they had been watered down or dissipated in Act IV. So I rearranged, with Francis Rainey, some of the music in Act IV to give it more impact and to end the ballet in a way that I felt reconciled the human spirit. Part of it is my Scottish background. One of the Scots’ great genetic gifts is a very highly developed sense of fair play. So, in my “fair play” scenario, I felt that it would be stronger that good triumph over evil in the fourth act rather than her become the victim. It’s not the first time it’s been done and it’s not an original idea of mine. As I said earlier, I take the script of Petipa and the music of Tchaikovsky and I direct the production with that material.
SD: But it isn’t as though you have no creative input.
BS: From my years of training, I know what Petipa would accept. I know the dialogue that Balanchine would accept. I know the dialogue that Ashton would accept.
SD: When you say the “dialogue”?
BS: I understand their dance vocabularies and their dialect of the language of dance. Therefore, when I put a ballet together and pay attention to the classical structure, I know instantly if a dancer is doing something that is outside the acceptable range of Petipa and Ivanov’s voice in Swan Lake – even though we are more than a hundred years down the line from the original production.
SD: That being the case, how do you feel about a production like Matthew Bourne’s?
BS: Absolutely great. Wonderful. I was sitting in the cinema last week watching Avatar and thinking, “That idea came from there and that’s taken from that.” There is no such thing as an original thought. But there is an original way of looking at it, and Matthew’s great genius is that he has an eye for looking at things in a completely different way. But he can also do it in a social/structural sense that will make it acceptable to an audience.
SD: His production of Swan Lake was a critical success, but I’m not sure it played well in Peoria.
BS: That’s the great thing about contemporary art. Whether you like it or not, it makes you ask questions. The work of our resident choreographer, Adam Hoagland, is a very good example in his Rite of Spring from last year – there’s taking an idea and completely turning it on its head! We asked ourselves, “What kind of Rite of Spring are we talking about?” Wendy Whelan as the central figure, being destroyed at the end by the element water…by melted ice…came from a conversation about global warming. My version of Swan Lake is incredibly traditional because I have a passion for my art form and the roots I came from are those of a classical dancer. But, at the same time, I’m cognizant of the fact that it’s not 1890.
SD: Then do you see your role partly as that of preservationist?
BS: One of the reasons I came to Louisville was because Alun Jones had, in 25 years, built an extraordinary foundation. Every version of the classical ballets he did here really have to be taken care of because they are incredibly ethical. As much as they are Alun’s versions of the classics, there is no betrayal. I admire his Sleeping Beauty immensely. Part of my role here is to take care of the past in such a way that we are building and investing for the present and the future. I want to maintain the classical ballets so that they are not lost but, at the same time, change them in such a way that we are not disturbing the integrity of the work as we make them acceptable, interesting and enjoyable for an audience watching it today.
SD: Leslie Dunner has just joined the company as principal conductor. What is that collaborative process like?
BS: I’ve been working with Leslie for about fifteen years. He has conducted Don Quixote and The Nutcracker for us and he will conduct Swan Lake. The wonderful thing about Leslie is that his education included dance.
SD: He was a dancer?
BS: No, but dance was a part of his college curriculum, so he really understands how difficult it is for dancers if the tempo is really terrible. A conductor can absolutely ruin a dancer’s performance because you can only stand on a point shoe on one leg for so many seconds. If the conductor is dragging out the bow, no human being can stand there. I don’t think people recognize the rarity of great dance conductors, and Leslie has a passion for it.
SD: Have you chosen your Swan Queen?
BS: Casting is a tricky thing. It’s very fluid and can change from day to day based on dancers’ physical and mental states. We have to look at who is injured, whether we have just come off a long run or a particularly difficult program, etc. Usually, you teach the parts to numerous dancers and see where it leads you. We don’t “officially” formalize casting until ten working days prior to performances. But throughout this process, I love finding out what the dancers can do and exploring with them those unique qualities in themselves – that’s why I come to work every day. In the end, when the curtain goes up, I’m sitting in the dark…and then it’s all about the culmination of many people’s input and collaboration to make that performance the best we can make it.
Louisville Ballet will perform Swan Lake at Whitney Hall April 9 and 10. For more information on this production and to purchase tickets, call (502) 584-7777 or go to louisvilleballet.org.