KEY POINTS:
The Royal New Zealand Ballet has set the cat among the cygnets with its latest production, Swan Lake.
Not only has it been implicated in the cancellation of a planned tour by a Russian company, but the choreographer has also been accused of "rewriting history".
The company is halfway through its current season, an eight-city national tour of Swan Lake. Reviews have been largely positive.
However, ballet super-fan Rhonda Snelgar has taken the show's veteran choreographer Russell Kerr to task over his handling of the penultimate scene, where the heroine Odette/Odile and her man Prince Siegfried traditionally drown themselves.
Snelgar, who has seen every New Zealand Ballet production in the past 20 years, said she was appalled by Kerr's "happy ending" in the version she saw last Saturday. He had rewritten one of the most famous ballets in theatrical history, she said.
"Swan Lake is a beautiful, tragic story of magic, love, deceit and ultimately the death of Odette. It is her death scene that draws the theatregoers. Yet for some reason his scene has a happy ending [with] Odette and the Prince running off into the sunset."
Past versions of Swan Lake by the company had been true to the seminal 19th century performance by Lev Ivanov and Marious Petipa, Snelgar said.
"You go expecting to see the Swan Lake you know. Pretty much the entire audience in the first four or five rows were like 'what?' "
But Kerr said while a happy ending (first introduced during Stalinist rule) was often used as an alternative, his finale followed the original "as closely as possible". The Auckland audience may have interpreted the use of a spotlight to indicate sunrise wrongly, he said. "Unusually we don't always bring that in. But it's not sunset. It is daybreak, the time when the swans become maidens again."
The controversy doesn't stop with the ending, however.
The RNZB's production was to have been followed next month by a tour of the same ballet by the St Petersburg-based Konstantin Tachkin theatre dancers.
The troupe had also planned to perform Giselle, a ballet toured by the New Zealanders just six months ago. But last week the Russians cancelled, citing the conflicting schedules and a jingoistic advertising campaign, for poor ticket sales. Promotional material for the RNZB had invited audiences to "support your native birds".
Tachkin producer Andrew Guild was hopping mad: "What does that signal? Don't go to see the Russians? I would have thought RNZB could have tolerated a visiting company of repute."
He said he was made aware of the double-up only during the booking process - Tachkin was to have toured following a season in South Africa - and had met local organisers to discuss it. However neither side was willing to alter their plans.
"I chose not to ambush RNZB. The last visit by Tachkin attracted close to 70,000 sales. I believe that's a lot more tickets than the New Zealand ballet sold... My belief was that there would have been enough people to choose one or the other, but we all tend to forget that [it] is a tiny country."
Amanda Skoog, RNZB's general manager, said its show schedule was done three years in advance. Guild's decision to tour Swan Lake straight after the New Zealand run had come "like a bolt straight out of the blue".
"He knew we were doing Swan Lake, and he knew we had just done Giselle. It was his call."
She denied the promotion was designed to shoot down the Russians, saying it alluded to the competitive international market and the need to build a strong, local support base.
"We are very dependent on that. The income from the box office is crucial to our survival," Skoog said.
Swan Lake plays in Dunedin from Thursday.
