Philadelphia Ballet presents Swan Lake

Clear as Glass

For Landscaping, he faced a gap in the program around two pieces that made use of only half the dancers. So he decided to create something with the rest of the company. “I adore Philip Glass. I had this piece of music that I was completely in love with—I saw people moving, energy going, and I thought, let’s try it and let the music and the dancers help me. And it was done in less than a week and a half. The whole ballet. It was that fast.”

While he loves the pas de deux and the solos, Corella admitted, “I like to work with patterns and I really like to work with big groups of dancers.” His work is also marked by its musicality. For Landscaping, he says, “I wanted to use all the layers of the music, and I think that is what made an impact—I was so comfortable with the music.” He said he learned a lot from observing the work of choreographers like Jiří Kylián and William Forsythe, who may interrupt the measure of a dance with three steps to a single beat, or just half a step to keep it interesting. But it is always about the music: “that is something Balanchine said, it’s like you are seeing the music in the dancers. So that was my intention, to show the music through the dancer.”

The art of experimenting

For Swan Lake, Corella has taken into consideration the sensibility of a contemporary audience that loves the romantic ballets of the past. He said he feels more comfortable with these ballets because he has danced them so often. “I think I danced Swan Lake with like 20 different companies around the world.” He learned the history and the nuances of the work and then, he said, “I tried to gather all the different beautiful moments from the many different versions that I’ve done and put them together into this Swan Lake.” At the same time, he said, dancers can do a lot more today, “so you have to experiment with the kind of movement that is going to be understood by today’s audiences.”

Modern audiences, however, have a short attention span, so Corella has made some judicious cuts, trimming the national dances in particular. “In the score, in some cases, the phrases are repeated five or six times. Okay, I got it already!” Beno’s solo in Act 3 is gone because it felt redundant, but the pas de deux between Siegfried and Odette is a little longer, he said, to give them a little more time to reconnect before the big death scene. Baron Von Rothbart, the evil magician, will ditch the heavy cape for an impressive set of wings that will make it easier to dance.

Still, he hates to call himself a choreographer. “I know how to put steps together, and I know how to put them with the music, but I think a choreographer really has a special vocabulary.” However, it may be that his visual grasp of pattern is his signature. If Swan Lake leaves you wanting to sample more of Corella’s choreography, the company will be performing another piece this summer at Red Rose Farm—he promises Lindy Hop!