To the delight of the nation's ballet fans, "Swan Lake" will shortly be gracing the Tokyo summer for two weeks — not in its traditional classical form, but in the new-classic guise of "Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake," a revolutionary twist on ballet's most tried-and-true tutu tale.
With its all-male corps of white swans, this trail-blazing work by English choreographer Matthew Bourne has been credited with reconfiguring the whole world of ballet as it has brought innovations of contemporary performance out of the wings and onto the classical-ballet stage.
Before this "Swan Lake" — which since its stunning premiere in 1995 has often been described as "gender-bending," "witty" and "menacing" — ballet history had flirted with avant-garde innovations famously born of collaborations between Paris-based Ballets Russes and the likes of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the composer Igor Stravinsky, the designer Coco Chanel and artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse during the company's 1909-29 span.