Pforzheim

No white swan as a symbol of innocence and grace, no black counterpart as a dark side. The Pforzheim ballet director Guido Markowitz and his deputy Mar Rodríguez Valverde have eliminated the central conflict of the archetypal romantic fairy-tale ballet for their contemporary production of Schwanensee: Odette and Odile are two swans acting with equal rights; there is no good-evil dualism, but rather two independent characters with sympathetic and less sympathetic sides, two characters with whom one can fall in love simultaneously. Which Prince Siegfried does—love here culminates in a polyamorous three-way relationship; the pas de deux between Odette and Siegfried are reimagined as a pas de trois; and because Odile is played by Joshua Pilgrim (alternating with Ido Stirin), the whole thing ...