YUP'IK "SWAN LAKE"

A swan on the northern prairie is quite a different thing from the tame swans in the park.  They are the earliest of the big migratory birds who come through in the spring and fly in smaller groups, but they have the same magical quality of being able to rise into the sky, becoming more enchanted as their wings take them among the clouds.  Not all of them make noise (“mute” swans) but those who do (“trumpeter” and “whooper”) are impressive.

I’ve captured wild swans (it was a legal hunting season and we wounded one) and I’ve eaten them.  They are fiery, substantial and determined.  Held in the arms, they are about the size and weight of human babies.  I’ve never seen one in the Blackfeet sacred bundles that often include other waterfowl.  I say all this to anchor a poetic and artistic concept in a reality of circumpolar culture, which is a white (snow), powerful, elusive and very beautiful wild bird.  At some point in the Miocene, one branch of the family ended up in Australia where it evolved separately to a black (charred -- Australia is a fire-driven continent) bird that holds its neck in a curve instead of the straight-up way of the northern birds.  In the 18th and 19th centuries when curious ships prowled the world, black swans were brought back to England and gifted to the Queen.  Swans became associated with royalty and the novelty of a black swan paired with white swans was an aesthetic conceit of great charm.

Ballet developed out of European court dancing and depended on the elongation and leaping of dancers, so swans as subject matter was quite natural, especially the long lines of the corps de ballet who sometimes seemed to fly and other times had the choppy gait of waterfowl on land.  In the usual Manichean fascination with good/white versus bad/black and with finding “wild” princesses (African or Native American), the plot line pursued elusiveness and evil.

After all this, the phrase “black swan” as simply an unexpected anomaly that is the title of a popular book about economics, which has no relationship whatsoever.  But in an equally strange anomaly, a poetic explorer’s discovery was mixed with a recent ballet movie, “Black Swan,” so that all those people out there who never really pay attention, merely knew that there was something important about the idea and so “flocked” to the movie.  There they found that historical court dance culture had evolved radically into the celebrity obsessed Manhattan world where torture, madness and love (or sex) mix in our psychologically driven horror film style.  So far away from the serene image of the floating swan.  Not so far away from a wounded wild swan counter-attacking an attacker.

On YouTube there is a startling cultural conflation of the traditional “Swan Lake” with Chinese gymnastics that has the ballerina en pointe on top of her male partner’s head !  It’s even beyond Pilobolus!  Some find it a descration, but I’m always intrigued by cultural synthesis in both arts and religion, because it is so often a kind of access to dreams and assumptions.

Now Mike Dunham of the Anchorage Daily News (mdunham@adn.com)  tells us about a new development, a version of “Swan Lake” called “Qug’yuq” (Yup’ik for swan) that picks up on the “shape-shifting” tradition that is world-wide: seals who become lovers at the seaside, elusive women who become horses on the prairie, destroying men who turn to grizzly bears.  Always everywhere, coyote slipping in and out of tricksy roles.  The enchantment of desire with the extra aphrodisiac of voodoo evil.

This version of the story does not depend upon the Jekyll/Hyde of white swan/black swan, but turns to a trickster figure far better known in the arctic:  Raven, who wants the Swan for himself.  The music is augmented with Yup’ik drumming and singing, the dance with traditional Yup’ik steps, esp. in a village scene, and familiar old Tchaikovsky is nudged over for bits of Mahler.  This is HIGHLY sophisticated and eclectic.

But “Swan Lake” has always been that, a skeleton so strong that it can endure any abuse.  Dunham notes that Tchiakovsky’s brother rewrote the ballet to create a happy ending.  “There have been animated film versions . . . Cheery ‘Swan Lakes.’  Obsessively morbid ‘Swan Lakes.’ ‘Swan Lakes’ set in a Victorian insane asylum.  Matthew Bourne’s stupendously successful all-male ‘Swan Lake.’”

To think of the story in a pendantic, academic way, one could refer to what Dunham found: “a folk story written down by Johann Karl August Musaus around 1780.”  Collected in much the same spirit as capturing a black swan to give the Queen, I expect.  Even more interesting is Musaus’ own story in Jena, Germany.  He evidently liked to write satire and had intended to become a preacher, but in those Protestant repressive times he was disqualified because he had been a dancer.  Perhaps ‘Swan Lake” is not so much the innocent story about birds and princes as we think it is, so irreproachably upscale and suitable for children.  Maybe “Black Swan” returns the dynamics to something like its roots.  A satire.

In the Yup’ik version presented by the Alaska Dance Theatre in collaboration with the Eugene, Oregon, Ballet Company, both the Raven (Tulukarusk) and the male lover (Ciuqnaq), are entranced by the beautiful woman, who is made into a Trumpeter Swan by Raven.  What happens from there is not disclosed.  

Both the producers and the performers are mixed between Yup’ik and Oregon dance world figures.  Codie Costello is executive director of Alaska Dance Theatre; Gillmer Duran is Alaska Dance Theatre’s resident choreographer; Ossie Kairaiuak leads the Heritage Center’s drummers and dancers.

I’ll make these principles plain:  all culture, art and religion is syncretistic because it is a mimesis of something real, transformed by the traditions and experience of people in a way that has meaning to them, and then possibly RE-transformed by a culture or reality previously unknown but now meaningful.  The success of this is determined by the validity of the inner structure and the skill with which the new mimesis is managed.

If I were a choreographer first inventing a dance about swans, I would be divided about whether the arms should imitate the long necks of the birds or the extended and pulsing wings.  I would want the wings to be as much weapons (they can bruise you -- I know) as flight.  But my biggest problem is that I see black and white as thoroughly mixed.  I would have to invent gray swans.  Of course, the babies ARE gray.  So here we are, arrived at the Ugly Duckling who turned out to be a swan.

THE DARK EROS OF THE BIG BACKSIDE

When I was “doing education” for animal control, I used to complain that the four main things I needed to talk about were all taboo in polite society: Birth, death, sex and shit. Of course, the reason they cried out for education was that when something is taboo, it cannot be discussed and therefore no one knows anything much about it. They just wander around making guesses and accumulating wrong-headedness.

This is not just true of dogs. People are also much in the dark about their own birth, death, sex and shit, though they have begun to wonder out loud. For instance, I once saw an advice column by a doctor in a counterculture publication. He was asked this question: a frat boy was organizing a big party that was supposed to impress everyone with their daring sophistication. So he wanted to know whether, if they decorated their punch bowl with a specimen of human excrement on a floating cake of ice, whether they would actually be endangering the guests. (Which is not the same issue as whether anyone would be tempted to partake.) The doctor, completely straight-faced, said that normal stomach acid would kill almost anything contagious in human excrement but that it would be a good idea to get the donor checked for hepatitis first. Maybe the more ubiquitous human gut parasites as well.

So there are really two things to think about here: the actual reality of shit and the mythology of shit, which makes the substance so attractive to those out to shock and revolt. Since Freud, no psychoanalyst has been unaware that in dreams shit equals money. Sometimes sex. Observers have noticed that taboo subjects are only taboo to the middle classes, maybe because of ambivalence. The sophisticated top layers of society like to talk more about sex than about money. Sex talk becomes a kind of privilege because it’s “adults only.” If you wear a white coat like Dr. Masters, you can ask people anything, ask them to DO anything. But it is also a power-marker for the underclasses and lower classes where common vernacular is full of those old Anglo-Saxon low class markers: four-letter words. Middle class people say, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” and refuse to even say the word shit.

“Dark Eros” by Thomas Moore is a serious upperclass sophisticated investigation into the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, who was much interested in sex and shit and what they stood for. He spent much of his life sitting in prison pondering all these things and writing semi-sane screeds against the Powers That Be, describing them as libertines who had no human empathy, wanting only more power. I knew very little about de Sade until reading this. I started to read some of his stuff long ago but found it profoundly boring, which Moore grants right away. It is NOT pornography, which is supposed to be the opposite. After all, the idea of porn is to sell it.

One of the first surprises is that de Sade concentrated on bottoms, from the back, which our society finds amusing and childish. The effect of this choice is to lessen the importance of gender difference: rear ends are much more androgenous than the breasts and penises law requires us to cover. We spank on bottoms. We worry about whether they are too big. Mooning is funny and shocking and insulting, but not considered sexy. And yet, spanking erotica is a huge category in porn, especially in the upperclass circles of Britain where spanking or flogging or caning was a big part of adolescent life at boarding schools and became conflated with the antics of boys in dorms and group showers. I guess that’s not impossible to understand. And blacks, always more honest, call bottoms their “booty.”

But de Sade, in his quest for the unmentionable, talked quite a bit about what he called “the gourmands of excrement.” There are two ages when people get fascinated by excrement. One is the baby and sometimes the distressed or regressing child who simply see a smearable and smelly substance to dig fingers into. They put EVERYTHING in their mouths. The other is the oldsters who worry constantly about becoming impacted, even as they decrease their intake of roughage. On the other hand, they may become incontinent, “dirty old men.” There is also a peculiar time when entering intimacy with another person and becoming aware of things normally kept secret, like, they also use the bathroom. What a surprise!

Being an archetypal psychotherapist means pinning discussion to one of the Greek pantheon as a sort of container for a group of concepts. As it happens, the latrine workers were under the protection of Saturn, “the lord both of the outhouse and of freedom, Saturnalia. He liberates from the restraints of a narrow morality. . .” Repression as a Saturnine leads to such shit as “our cities littered with his literal garbage, and our homes . . . teeming with the excrement of human family emotions.” Impacted.

Moore remarks “government has an enormous backside.” Don’t we know it. So often horses’ asses producing bullshit. But we don’t seem to taste it, “get it,” digest it. We just hold our noses and go around. As Moore notes, the backsides are SO much more interesting than the facades of people. All those politicians who are boringly upright in front but mighty loose from the back. All those major athletic or literary personalities with unsuspected child-sides, locked in the bathroom.

Going back to the bottom without the squishy stuff, Moore makes a small mention of Aphrodite, whose alternate name was Kalliglautos, "She of the Lovely Behind." (When you write about naughty subjects, you always want to introduce some learned, i.e. Greek words.) In fact, she is often posed in a way that has a name: anasyrma, the lifting of the dress to reveal the naked body while glancing over the shoulder. Such a graceful revelation is not the same as de Sade’s insistence on torture, examination, standards (and the destruction of any lesser performers), controlling, counting, schedules, samples for testing, nit-picking attention to religion, aging, suppression, depression. cold and distance. Often it is the denial of one’s own weakness and inferiority by imposing punishment (torture) on others marked as weak and inferior. In short, modern bureaucracy in too many shitty ways.

The book is "Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism," by Thomas Moore. 1990. ISBN 0-88214-365-4