An online + offline audience chooses its own ending to the ballet classic
What do you get when you unleash the idiosyncratic, international dance group Club Guy & Roni on the classic ballet known in the Netherlands as Het Zwanenmeer? You get Swan Lake: a remix of the classic work, in the form of an event running in parallel online and offline from three locations in the theatre. A performance about our desire to escape into a perfect fairy-tale world and the danger of losing touch with reality. The live audience at the venue walks from scene to scene and is forced to make choices along the way that determine how the performance proceeds. At the same time, viewers participating in Swan Lake the game online will also determine how the fairy tale ends.
Everyone has a say, and with this influence comes responsibility. By spotlighting the Swan Lake audience’s responsibility, the creators of the piece aim to explore how we might proceed following a crisis. The term black swan is used to denote an economic phenomenon that was impossible to predict but nevertheless has a huge effect on the system. How should we proceed now that the combined black swan of Covid-19 and the climate crisis has upended our fairy-tale democratic, liberal consumer’s paradise? Will we start a new story together?
By Club Guy & Roni + Slagwerk Den Haag + Tomoko Mukaiyama
Choreography: Roni Haver and Guy Weizman