Wild Swans is a 2003 narrative ballet made for the Australian Ballet, retelling Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of Eliza, whose eleven brothers are turned into swans by a wicked stepmother and who must knit them shirts of stinging nettles to break the spell. It was commissioned jointly by the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Opera House, choreographed by Meryl Tankard to a purpose-written score by Elena Kats-Chernin, and runs some 90 minutes, placing it in the company of full-evening fairy-tale ballets such as The Nutcracker and Swan Lake.
What is danced
The article does not describe the choreography itself — no step vocabulary, no named divertissements, no pas de deux or corps patterns are given. What can be said from the source is structural: it is a full-length, fairy-tale narrative ballet with a clear plot spine (transformation of the brothers, Eliza's ordeal of silence and nettle-knitting, the breaking of the curse), commissioned specifically for the Australian Ballet's dancers rather than adapted from an existing production. The score itself is unusually specific about instrumental colour — prominent soprano, percussion (notably xylophone) and alto saxophone in the later concert suite — which suggests a score built around distinct musical set-pieces, but the article gives no synopsis broken into scenes or numbers that would let a reader match those musical moments to particular danced sequences.
Context
The ballet was made in 2002–03 as an Australian commission, pairing a choreographer (Meryl Tankard) and composer (Elena Kats-Chernin) who had already worked together on part of the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The article situates the work explicitly within the Tchaikovsky fairy-tale tradition, with Kats-Chernin naming Prokofiev and Stravinsky ballet scores as acknowledged influences — placing Wild Swans as a deliberate continuation of the story-ballet lineage rather than an abstract or plotless work.
Staging history
Wild Swans was given its premiere by the Australian Ballet at the Sydney Opera House on 29 April 2003. Kats-Chernin subsequently extracted a 12-movement, 30-minute concert suite from the ballet score, which was recorded in 2004 by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra under Ola Rudner with soprano Jane Sheldon (released by ABC Classics alongside her Piano Concerto and Mythic), and received its own Australian concert premiere on 18 May 2008 at the Sydney Conservatorium's Verbrugghen Hall, conducted by Matthew Krel with soprano Simone Easthope.
How to watch it
Because the source material gives no scene-by-scene breakdown, a viewer should watch for how the production stages the fairy tale's two hardest problems for a choreographer — the physical transformation of eleven men into swans and back, and Eliza's enforced muteness while knitting the nettle shirts — since both are points where a ballet's mime and ensemble vocabulary typically carry the narrative weight in the absence of danced dialogue. Listen also for the soprano and saxophone lines noted in the concert-suite arrangement, which likely correspond to the ballet's more lyrical or vocal moments on stage.
Credits
- composer: Elena Kats-Chernin