‘Swan Song’ Takes Us Behind the Scenes in the Brutal and Beautiful World of Ballet
We feel the physical pain as dancers dip their bruised feet in ice water, numb their injured nerves with injections and force themselves to eat well despite struggling with eating disorders.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says a disembodied voice, “this is your fifteen-minute call. Fifteen minutes, please, to the top of Act 1. The stage is available.” Young women sit before lit mirrors, applying makeup and false eyelashes. A man in a white N95 mask steps into the dressing room and says, “Have fun!” before blowing a kiss. “We’re gonna be really fuckin’ good,” someone tells him. “I have no doubt,” he says unconvincingly. “I am pumped!” A silver-blonde woman in black takes a seat in the theater’s balcony and wrings her hands as the orchestra tunes. In the wings, a brunette in a white feathered tutu grinds the tip of her pointe shoe in a box of rosin. On the balcony, the woman in black closes her eyes as the voice announces, “Thank you for joining us for the world premiere of our new production of Swan Lake.”
This is the unflinching opening of Swan Song, a verité-driven feature documentary that takes viewers behind the scenes of the National Ballet of Canada’s 2022 production of Swan Lake. The film, written and directed by Chelsea McMullan (known for My Prairie Home and Crystal Pite: Angels’ Atlas) and executive produced by dancer-turned-actress Neve Campbell, premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and quickly made a name for itself on the film festival circuit (it won the award for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the 2023 Calgary International Film Festival and was the inaugural winner of the Rogers Best Canadian Documentary award at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards 2023) and was released in theaters and on streaming late last month.
It all began when McMullen learned that Canadian ballet legend Karen Kain would be directing (for the first time) and staging a new production of the beloved classic Swan Lake (the very ballet responsible for her promotion to Principal Dancer in 1971) before retiring from the National Ballet of Canada, an organization Kain was involved with—first as a dancer and then as Artistic Director—for 50 years. It was February of 2020, and McMullan was searching for a new project to work on with producer Sean O’Neill. The two enjoyed collaborating on the award-winning CBC arts documentary series In The Making and wanted to continue creating work with and about artists. The new Swan Lake was set to premiere in June, though, and that didn’t give them much time to gather the necessary funds and manpower to start shooting.
SEE ALSO: Observer’s Guide to This Year’s Must-Visit August Art Fairs
But then March rolled in like a sickly lion, and the Covid-19 pandemic shut everything down. The production was postponed indefinitely, and the ballet company closed its doors for eighteen months. Suddenly, McMullen and O’Neill had all the time they needed, and more, to plan their project.
When I asked Kain how she felt when McMullen approached her with the idea for the documentary, she admitted with a laugh that she was flattered but also thought, “Oh my god, how am I going to fit this in, as well as everything else I’m trying to do?” She also worried she’d be self-conscious, though her busyness was a blessing, as she barely noticed the film crew. “They were really careful about not interfering too much,” she added.
In some ways, Swan Song is a film about Kain’s final contribution to her company—hence the title—but it is also about much more. Kain is just one interesting character surrounded by other interesting characters. Her looming retirement fades into the background as other more urgent production challenges step forward, and that was purposeful. In their filmmaker statement, McMullan and O’Neill explain that they knew from the beginning of the process that Kain wouldn’t be the lead character. They weren’t interested in a biographical documentary. Instead, she would be “the center point around whom the action revolved, receiving the same treatment and screen time as each of the other primary subjects, a member of an ensemble of people working toward something impossible, amid a time of utter instability.” Odette surrounded by her corps of swans.
Kain and the company agreed to grant full access to the filmmakers. Thanks in part to the time vortex of the pandemic, McMullen and their crew followed the company for nearly two years, interviewing every member and gaining insights into the ups and downs of their lives. By the end, they had gathered almost 500 hours of footage, which then had to be edited and re-edited down to the eventual, incredible 103 minutes.
Neve Campbell was brought on to the project as it entered production. “They didn’t even realize my connection to it,” she told me with delight, “or my deep love for Karen Kain.” Campbell had trained as a ballerina and attended the prestigious National Ballet School of Canada. “Karen was the first prima ballerina I had ever witnessed and is probably one of the reasons I became an artist. To be able to make a film that was honoring her story and the National Ballet of Canada, I was very excited.”
When putting the documentary together, McMullen and O’Neill were inspired by several films: Pina (the visually stunning tribute to German choreographer Pina Bausch), The Company (Robert Altman’s drama based on the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, starring Campbell), and—believe it or not—The Lord of the Rings trilogy. “We conceived of the performance like a battle scene,” they explain in a statement. “We wanted viewers to feel what it’s like to perform a ballet on that scale rather than try to watch a truncated live capture focused only on beauty and aesthetics.”
In this, the filmmakers succeed. We do feel what it’s like to prepare for a performance on such a large scale. We see the anxiety on the young choreographer Robert Binet’s face as he watches Kain watch the new movement sequences. We see the tension in Kain’s shoulders as she carries the company’s burden of a pandemic-induced $13 million box office loss. We feel the physical pain of the dancers as they dip their bruised feet in ice water, numb their injured nerves with injections and force themselves to eat well despite struggling with eating disorders.
One of the film’s most interesting subplots, though, was a surprise for even the filmmakers. While meeting about the costume design, Kain announces that she would like the Corps—who she conceived of not as birds but as abducted women dressed as swans for Rothbart’s twisted pleasure—to be bare-legged instead of wearing the traditional pink and white tights. Even in 2022, that was a radical suggestion, and it led to fascinating conversations among the dancers. Some are hesitant, while others (like Black Australian Corps member Tene Ward) are profoundly moved by it.
Another highlight of the film is getting to know the Russian Principal Dancer Jurgita Dronina, who struggles with a painful injury while balancing motherhood and a professional dance career, and American Corps member Shaelynn Estrada, who defies so many stereotypes within the world of ballet. We care deeply about them by the end of the film, and that is no small feat.
While these emotional subplots and interviews woven through the film offer moments of pause and contemplation, the ticking time bomb narrative is propulsive. The film opens right before the curtain rises on opening night, then cuts back to the summer of 2020. It then leaps forward to the first day of rehearsals and counts down from there until we arrive again at a beginning that is also an ending: opening night. By this point, we are wringing our hands right along with Kain, because things are not looking good. Estrada admits, “All of us are crumbling, you know?” The premiere performance is its own built-in climax, and what a climax it is.
When the show is ending and the dancers are waiting in the wings for their bow, one of them whispers, “I am so proud of us… nobody understands.” She’s right—the general public doesn’t know what it takes to mount a new ballet production, to dedicate your life to an art form that you love boundlessly even though it takes so much from your body and psyche and, as Campbell pointed out when we spoke, doesn’t always give back.
Swan Song will change that, though. Kain said she hopes it helps audiences understand more about what these “artist-athletes” go through. “Even when you’re in the best shape of your life, you have physical pain every day and you have to work through it. The body just wasn’t meant to train that hard for years and years and years. It’s like running a marathon every day.” She added, “I was really taken with the film because I thought it was honest on every level. There seems to be an idea out there that dancing is just fun. You get to wear all that fun makeup and those costumes, and you have a great time. And we do enjoy the costumes and the makeup and the theatricality of it all, but there’s so much more that is painful, psychologically and physically, in trying to be an athlete every single day of your life.”
Kain is retired now, and as she said these words I could sense relief, but also longing.