“Swan Lake” by Peter I. Tchaikovsky is the most famous ballet of all time. Since its world premiere in 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow there have been countless interpretations of this romantic dance fairy tale. The epitome of these remains Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s legendary St. Petersburg choreography from 1895. In 2018/19 the Ballett am Rhein presents Martin Schläpfer’s version on both its stages in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, in which the Swiss choreographer uses his remarkably individual dance vocabulary – both physical and highly expressive in equal measure – to focus on “all the fascinating darkness, psychic secrets and archetypes” and carry us off into a world “in which ghosts and unexplained phenomena are not yet dismissed as figments of our imagination”.
