I bet you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for Part III since the series first appeared back in 2012 (here are Part I and Part II).

No? Well, here’s Part III anyway.

Just to recap—“Swan Lake” is popular for a reason; actually for many reasons. There’s the glorious music by Tchaikovsky. Not to mention the incredibly beautiful choreography, particularly of the second (“white”) act. Audiences also enjoy the fanciful story involving bewitchment, true love, and tragic betrayal. The idea of a swan-woman (Odette is not a swan, although she is turned into one by day; she is a woman who retains some swannish characteristics) is particularly fitting for the soaring, curving, powerful yet delicate lines of ballet.

The rest of this post features videos of a single fairly brief passage from the ballet’s second act, as performed by three different dancers and their partners. The men don’t have a lot of dancing to do in these clips, yet they’re extremely important both as physical partners and as emotional ones.

What’s happening here is that the Prince, who is already in love with Odette, has finally allayed her shyness and understandable fear (after all, he tried to kill her at first sight, because when he first saw her she was in swan form). The clips begin with the moment Odette surrenders to the power of love, marked by her walking away in fear but then walking back towards him of her own free will. She has made her decision. She knows their love may be doomed—that’s why this isn’t a light and happy pas de deux—but she has come to trust him.

All three dancers are very very different, although all three are Russian. I will begin with the most recent one, Polina Semionova, who is only 33 years old now and who is still dancing. I believe this video is from nine years ago, although I’m not certain. She is ectomorphic and known for her long lean lyric line, which is surpassingly beautiful and extreme in a modern way that no dancer was when I was growing up. Her tempo is very slow, which is also a modern trend.

In all three videos, please note what I call the “rocking” parts, or the “leans,” where the man cradles the woman, comforts and even at times rocks her slightly, and she leans into him. Semionova is the most passive of the three in that section, which for me decreases its emotional impact.

Semionova:

Now we go back about 40-50 years ago to the great Maya Plisetskaya. I saw her perform in person several times, and I’ve written quite a few posts about her. Plisetskaya’s body type is very different—she’s much more of a mesomorph—and the tempo is much faster, which means she can’t draw out the extensions the way Semionova could. She also doesn’t have as gymnastically pliant a body, and in this somewhat blurry clip (during the 60s?) she is no longer in her prime. But the emotion is there, and in her time she was a revelation. A great many recent dancers emphasize the swan-creature aspects of Odette, and although in her arms and upper back Plisetskaya is very much the swan-creature, she creates more of a balance between the woman and the swan. And when she leans into him, she really gives herself over to it:

Natalia Makarova is another dancer I’ve seen in person many times. This clip is from 1976, when she was still going strong. She uses a slow tempo, too, like Semionova—or it might be more correct to say that Semionova uses a slow tempo, like Makarova, since Makarova was her predecessor.

I love the interpretations of all three dancers, but if I had to choose among them my favorite would be Makarova. She balances everything: the woman with the swan, the emotional with the physical, and the love with the fear, in a fluid tour de force of expressive movement (and some nice leans, too). Some of the credit should go to her partner Ivan Nagy as well, who is attentive and present, expressing his love and caring in every detail of how he moves with her and looks at her. You can see it, despite the mild blurriness. Never calling attention to himself, he helps to make the two of them a seamless whole: