This Valentine’s Day weekend, a classic ballet returns to the Queen City.
Cincinnati Ballet and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra will perform Swan Lake, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s iconic tragedy, at Music Hall in Over-the-Rhine starting this Friday. Performances will run throughout this weekend and next.
In Swan Lake, one of the most famous romantic tragedies of all time, Princess Odette is cursed by an evil sorcerer and forced to spend her daylight hours transformed into a swan. Later on, she meets and falls in love with Prince Siegfried.
Famously, it is one of the hardest ballets to perform, due to the extreme difficulty of the choreography and the duel role of Odette and Odile that one ballerina must play. A press release from Cincinnati Ballet said the choreography “demands extraordinary versatility, asking dancers to transform seamlessly from a figure of light and love into one of darkness and deceit within the same performance. This duality not only tests technical precision, but also demands profound emotional depth and dramatic nuance.”
New for this version are refreshed costumes, which have been unchanged in performances of Swan Lake since the 1990s. Prince Siegfried and various members of the Corps, in particular, will look drastically different.
Tickets are available now on the Cincinnati Ballet’s website.