I know that’s the burning question you’ve all been asking yourselves for years: was “Swan Lake’s” swan queen Odette a swan, or was she a woman? Did Prince Siegfried actually have an interspecies romance?

And I’m here to answer: Odette was a woman under a spell. The spell turned her into a swan by day and a woman (a “maiden”) at night. So Siegfried first spies her in swan form flying in the sky and is about to shoot her with a crossbow, when to his amazement she alights as a woman. An attractive woman, at that – but a woman who retains some of her swan nature.

That’s why the choreography so beautifully merges the woman with the swan. Odette manages to be primarily woman but she conjures up the swan at all moments. What’s more, she conveys an intense conflict between wanting to take flight, to escape, to get away (from both her spell and at first from the Prince as well), and wanting to trust him and to love and be loved.

As with many ballets of this era, the plot features the Prince betraying her trust and then regaining it, although with tragic consequences. It’s the “white” acts of the ballet – the swan parts, Acts II and IV – that give the ballet its well-deserved fame. Most productions today use a version of the brilliant and innovative Lev Ivanov’s 1895 choreography, with its wonderful patterns of the flock of swan-maidens, conjuring up the same themes of flight, trust, and distrust.

One of my favorite parts is when Odette is transformed by the spell-caster magician Von Rothbart from woman to swan, right before our eyes. Here’s a clip of that moment with Natalia Makarova in the 1970s:

Here’s the fabulous Maya Plisetskaya in 1957 (I have quite a few quarrels with the way it’s filmed, but beggars can’t be choosers):

And this next one has the worst choreography for that transformation moment I’ve ever seen. Odette’s amazing change is completely upstaged by some strange interplay between Von Rothbart and Siegfried, as though it’s the Prince who’s undergoing the spell. And then it looks as though Von Rothbart and Siegfried are thinking of having their own little tete a tete. Von Rothbart as sorcerer is often costumed in a way that’s over-the-top and bordering on the ridiculous, but this version goes much too far in the other direction. He should look powerful and supernatural, not like a guy about to drink absinthe at a bar.

And this video features a transformation somewhere in between. Odette’s face changes a moment before the music cues her and becomes hard and almost calculating, which seems a bit weird. She’s not as convincing in her movements as an actual swan, either, although it’s not bad. The choreographic problem is that it’s much harder to pull the attempted transformation off while facing the audience. Most of the other Odettes have their backs to us, and there’s a reason for that: it helps not to see their faces; the transformation is easier to pull off when we don’t. And watching their backs emphasizes the use of the arms and the animal nature of their new forms:

Here’s Gillian Murphy in a different passage, one that features the jumps called entrechats, coupled with Odette’s swanlike arms showing the desperate need to escape as well as Odette’s dual nature:

Here’s Makarova again, performing the same passage:

But I think that Susan Jaffe, who is not as well known as the other two, actually expresses that same moment better. Her feet dig down while her arms struggle up, and there’s a constant tension between the two, as though she’s going to rend herself into two parts, the human and the bird:

Gillian Murphy also does a section I call “the leans” with an amazing move I’ve never seen before. It’s a port de bras (an arm movement) and it’s really her partner who makes the biggest difference. Usually this moment is very touching; it’s when Odette and the Prince are first falling in love and she’s coming to trust him because he treats her so lovingly and tenderly. Ordinarily the arm motion is merely that she’s got her arms up and extended (her swannish wingish but also humanish arms) and the Prince gently takes each arm down and wraps both of her arms around her torso, and then rocks her softly as she leans back into him in a gesture of trust. But with Murphy in this clip there is an added dimension – all done, of course, without words – by which we perceive that in that gesture he’s also saying, “No, don’t be a swan, don’t fly away, don’t struggle; put down your wings and I’ll free you from the spell and love you and you won’t have to have this tormented dual nature anymore. Rest a while.”

Watch and see if you see it too. The moment that particular sequence starts is at 5:58 (and then it happens a second time, but a little less slowly):

“Swan Lake” is very old and it has a theme that seems preposterous. But performed brilliantly, it transcends all of that and you see that it’s not just about swans and princes and magic spells, but something much deeper.