“It’s a kind of addiction,” says Karen Kain, “to be in an art form like this. Sometimes you wonder why you’re doing it. You have to get past so much physical pain, sometimes emotional pain. But those of us who do it and love it know why.” And director Chelsea McMullan’s documentary Swan Song shows us what an addiction to ballet means, with all the sweat, scars and pill-popping (OK, just ibuprofen – the dancers keep a score chart in the dressing room of how many they’ve taken), as well as the beauty, artistry and exaltation.
Swan Song tells the story of Kain’s final production of Swan Lake in 2022, after 16 years as artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada. Kain is Canada’s most famous ballerina: she was a favourite of Rudolf Nureyev and danced all over the world; Andy Warhol made a screen print of her. McMullan follows her and the company on their mission to make a new ballet, and we see the daily quest for perfection of driven people pushing themselves to be their absolute best, often exhausted, frustrated or tearful. It is real and raw – and without descending into Black Swan-style melodrama, it shows the strains and discord, and the relentless daily battering the dancers’ bodies take.
“Ballet is punk rock as fuck,” says dancer Shaelynn Estrada in one scene, and it’s hard to disagree. Was Kain concerned about revealing too much? “No, because that is just the truth,” she says.
One of Swan Song’s executive producers is actor Neve Campbell, who studied at Canada’s National Ballet School from age nine to 14, and idolised Kain. Watching the footage McMullan would send her brought back a lot of memories. “It made me feel sorry for my young self,” she says over a group video call. “It’s a really challenging world to be a part of, and a beautiful world to be part of, and I did miss it desperately for years.” Campbell understands deeply what it is to want to dance. “I loved that I could express myself without words. I loved the magic of that. I loved moving my body. I loved technique. I loved the discipline. I loved the team atmosphere, the opportunity to push myself every day and improve on something that felt great.”
When injuries made it unfeasible for Campbell to pursue ballet, acting took over, but grief remained. “When I first stopped dancing, I couldn’t listen to classical music for about 10 years,” she says. “I couldn’t watch dance. It made me so deeply sad to not be a part of it.”
Actors and dancers are very different animals, says Campbell. “As a dancer, really you’re an athlete.” At school, she would do five and a half hours of dance each day, plus academic study. “Then you’re praying that you get into a company and your body holds up for you.” Plus, you have to make it all look easy. Campbell remembers one of the first things she learned was breathing out of the side of her ribs rather than her chest, so nobody could see the effort.
Campbell wants to get “butts in seats” in the theatre, so people can see exactly what dancers are capable of, and hopes the film might generate some hunger for that. “When you watch the Olympics, in the buildup you get these stories of what the athletes have been through and what they’ve sacrificed, and it makes the drama even more powerful.”
A common thread at this year’s Olympics has been athletes talking openly about their mental-health struggles, and that’s something the dancers in Swan Song certainly understand. Estrada especially talks frankly. “This is what it looks like to be actively overcoming your eating disorders,” she says cheerily in one scene while munching on a sandwich. But we also hear how she’s worried about having bare legs for a performance because she has scars on her thighs from self-harming. Still on the lowest rung of the company hierarchy, the corps de ballet, Estrada has pinned her self-worth on getting to the top and becoming a principal, and you root for her.
What could ballet companies be doing better to support their dancers’ mental health, I ask Kain, who herself suffered anxiety and quit dancing for a few years in the middle of her career. “There is a network of psychiatrists and psychologists you can see if you’re in trouble. The support system is there,” she says. And Campbell adds: “When I was at the school, you could have individual therapy. They have group counselling sessions for each class, so you could work out the dynamic – because it’s a very competitive atmosphere. We also had a nutritionist, they were really on top of it.”
When McMullan entered the ballet studio, the director felt like “an alien on a planet where everyone is speaking another language”. And with so many people in the studio during full company rehearsals, it was hard to know what was going on. “Even though you could feel there was a lot of drama, you couldn’t understand where it was coming from,” says McMullan. “There are so many things that are particular to that world. Of course there was the tights storyline, and we were like: ‘Who cares’, you know? It’s tights!” But in fact the tights storyline was a landmark moment for the company, who had always danced classical ballets in white or pale pink tights, regardless of the colour of the dancer’s own skin, and were deciding whether to jettison them in favour of bare legs, so everyone could be seen with their natural skin tone. “In ballet, everyone wants to honour tradition,” says dancer Tene Ward in the film. “But racism isn’t a good tradition.”
Elsewhere, the film-makers follow principal dancer Jurgita Dronina (who has also danced with English National Ballet), as she juggles parenthood and performances. She has been struggling with an excruciating nerve injury for eight years but has kept it quiet, and only reveals it on camera in the run-up to the premiere.
So there is plenty of drama backstage, but the whole reason for the new production was that Kain felt there was a lack of drama actually on the stage. The many versions of Swan Lake on offer were too academic, not heartbreaking enough; she wanted a ballet to make her cry. One change she talks about is wanting the swan maidens who are cursed by sorcerer Von Rothbart to seem like real women who’ve been abducted and are victims of male violence, rather than just fairytale creatures.
This production is based on Erik Bruhn’s 1967 version, with new material choreographed by Robert Binet. It was Bruhn’s Swan Lake in which Kain made her debut, aged 19. Bruhn was the great love of Nureyev’s life, and Nureyev was instrumental in Kain’s own career. “I was too tall for him but he didn’t care,” she remembers. “He just was determined that I was going to have a career. He was going to make me a better dancer.” What she learned from Nureyev was the graft. “His work ethic was extraordinary. I don’t know how he did what he did, we couldn’t keep up with him,” she laughs. “He would do seven shows a week of Sleeping Beauty – and he added five new variations [solos] for himself – and there he’d be in class the next morning, working harder than anyone.”
Kain comes across in the film as serene and smiling, but you know that there’s steel underneath. “I don’t have patience for people who don’t care as much about what they’re doing as I did,” she says. It is clear in Swan Song, though, that nobody pushes the dancers harder than they push themselves. As things are getting fraught in the run-up to opening night, a dancer’s pedometer shows they’ve covered 5km in one act, and that’s just one of many run-throughs. Binet muses on “this question of what’s worth it and what’s too much”. But ballet is a vocation for these dancers. “Why would anyone want to work that hard and hurt that much, the way dancers do, if it wasn’t a calling?” says Kain. “If they didn’t love it that much, it’s too hard.” She breaks into a smile. “But it isn’t so hard when you love it.”
Swan Song is in select cinemas and On Demand from 16 August
