WHITE SWAN, BLACK SWAN

Luminous debut collection by a former dancer with the Harkness Ballet in New York: a somber tour of the “kingdom of the dance” where bodies, loves, and lives are sacrificed to an art that often seems more punishment than reward.

Several of the pieces are about the same set of characters, while others are imaginative interpretations of the lives of such famous figures as Balanchine, Nureyev, Godunov, and Ashton. All are dark in mood, more like reports from a war zone—AIDS is pervasive, the women are anorexic, the men often drug addicted—than they are frothy tales of love and fame. The first, “Bugaku,” concerns a couple who become increasingly estranged as the woman wants to continue dancing while her burned-out lover feels there is more to life than ballet. In the notable “Don Quixote,” the renowned Balanchine recalls his obsession with prima ballerina Suzanne Farrell, whom he angrily fired for refusing to renounce her fellow dancer and lover, and in so doing nearly ruined his dance company. The title story uses the plot of Swan Lake to illuminate the dance and love triangle that develops when Lexa, who left Robbie—her dancer-lover and a drug addict—after he beat her up, only to return to find him having an affair with Sandra, the Queen of the Swans. Sandra is also the protagonist of “The Kingdom of the Shades,” in which she describes her breakdown after the end of her affair with Robbie and confesses her reluctance to dance again. Others pieces detail Nureyev’s incandescent partnership with Margot Fonteyn (“The Immortals: Margot Rudolf 4 Ever”); the recollections of a man, dying of AIDS, looking back over his life with a famous choreographer (“Departure”); and the regrets of a young woman who misses dancing, as well as being a part of the high caste of art that is ballet (“The Brahmins”).

A well-accomplished if downbeat debut.