Swan lake, Minnesota

The American heartland as seen through the mixed of views of 19th century ballet and 20th century performance television. Swan Lake, Minnesota adapts this Tchaikovsky classic to the Minnesota prairie landscape and emerges with a new kind of television structure. All the elements of the original ballet – plot, symbolism, characters, themes, music – are transferred to the daily life and culture of a contemporary farmer. What is the significance for INPUT? Swan Lake, Minnesota is actually the result of an earlier experimental work presented at INPUT 82 by directors Tom Adair and Kenneth Robins. The previous work, Sleeping Beauty Wakes up at the 10th Street Carwash, was an 11 minute piece which also used a Tchaikovsky ballet as a springboard for original and courageous production. Largely on the strength of this previous work’s powerful response at INPUT. Adair and Robins were able to garner enthusiasm and funding for this new, larger-scaled work which extends their Tchaikovsky-performance concept several steps further. INPUT audiences will most likely be seduced by the enhancing transfiguration and images; they may also be provoked by the controversial images here of men and woman – which is why Swan Lake has always been a radical ballet.