Dying Swan

"... The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full and clear;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold..."
~ Tennyson.

I have this short clip of Evelyn Hart dancing the Dying Swan for CBC's special tribute to Hart and Rex Harrington, "A Pairing of Swans" and I haven't tired of watching it yet.
The Dying Swan was choreographed by Fokine for Anna Pavlova (who was rumoured to have asked for her swan costume on her deathbed) and has since been danced many times by many acclaimed dancers thereafter, most notably Plietskaya, as well as parodied by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo with the swan wilting and strewing feathers across the stage. I've seen videos of different dancers each with their own interpretation of this famous solo and each time, one marvels at the fluidity of movement and the elegant mimic of the dancer's idea of a swan. Saint Saen's score is sublime (especially the recording of Yo Yo Ma) and just hearing the music is enough to conjure up an image of a swan skimming over the surface of a still lake, stretching it's wings out in a solitary waltz.

No dancer comes close to Hart's version. She does not wrap the solo in glossy lyricism, there's no precise poses of the fingers in classic balletic stances, no pretty fluttering of the arms as though the swan is in flight, nor quickening denials against the inevitable. It's a dance of a Dying swan and she imbues it with earthy heaviness as though the swan is much aware of her mortality. This last waltz of the swan is an acceptance almost and you feel the weight of death. Hart makes the dance tangible, the swan is not a heavenly being that carries its absolute beauty to the last flutters of death; the swan is a creature of the earth, and death a natural occurrence. Instead of making the audience observe a struggle for life and wishing that she won't die and will take off and fly away, we are drawn closer to the swan, to partake in the internal restlessness to reconcile life with death. The last stillness of the swan is not a fixed dainty pose, from the final quivers of the arm to the way she let's it fall, splayed as it will by her side. But through it all, grace is maintained, and there's a sense of dignity in the maturity of the acceptance of death, and it's so real. Her technical bravura may not match most of the other dancers out there but in interpretation and living out a role and making the pretense of such a constricting dance genre connect to us mere humans, she's incomparable. __________________________________________

I went to the Bird Garden today in Mong Kok and it broke my heart seeing Red-Whiskered Bulbuls, Starlings, Hill Mynas... all stuffed in tiny cages with barely enough room to maneuveur around much less fly and their beautiful tail feathers cut off. I saw a few Bulbuls with their head crest all ragged and almost cried. I hate it. Birds should never never be kept in captivity with no room to fly. It's like asking us not to breath.