`Swan' A Song To Loss. - Review - movie review

Dance Magazine, August, 2000 by Lewis Whittington

EVERY YEAR, an interpretation of Fokine's Dying Swan plays Philadelphia's Shut Up and Dance concert, a benefit for the Metropolitan AIDS Neighborhood Nutritional Alliance. Over the years, Pennsylvania Ballet dancers and guest artists have staged it classically and comedically, with men and women, traditionally and abstractly, and it always serves the concert's purpose--to remember.

This year, it appeared in the form of a Swan, a five-minute film by dance filmmaker Tobin Rothlein, who said he imagined the famous solo as "a hallucination, or the image in someone's head about how to die perfectly or to do anything perfectly. I'm taking the spectral Dying Swan as an idealized, unattainable beauty. And there's a message for dancers, too, that their bodies are trying to be something really beautiful, even if they never believe that they are beautiful or perfect in performance."

In Swan, shot in a dilapidated warehouse (at one point aswirl in feathers), Pennsylvania Ballet dancer Amanda Miller stares at broken mirrors on the wall and "sees" a dancing Leslie Carothers in a swan costume. The music bleeds from techno into the crystalline Saint-Saens classic as the dancers reprise the dance's ethereal structure; Miller shadows Carothers, a fellow PB veteran, in dual solos. For some viewers, the film evoked images of a quest for perfection; for others, it was symbolic of the soul's struggle with adversity.

Rothlein and Miller, recent newlyweds, conceived the film quickly while working with Carothers. "Leslie danced the traditional Swan and knew every nuance of the original choreography, whereas I was trying to bring forward a contemporary meaning," Rothlein said. "She would tell me, `Well, if you change that gesture, I don't get that idea anymore,' so it was very tricky."

Rothlein's previous film for the fund-raiser was 1998's Song of the Body, a black-and-white documentary with performance footage and personal testimonies from the dancers about people with AIDS they have known, and the impact of the disease on the dance community. The film was presented at Lincoln Center in January as part of the Dance on Camera Festival 2000.

"I get asked all the time, `Why are you always working with dance?'" Rothlein said. "[People] will say, `Oh, you're just a dance film director,' then they don't think that I can do anything else. Which is funny to me because, in many ways, any great film is a dance film."