Iskra Šukarova: The Red Swan (2008)

Choreographer Shukarova dedicated The Red Swan (Crveniot Lebed) to Ekrem Husein, a ballet dancer, one of the crucial figures in the national Opera and ballet in North Macedonia with a pronounced individuality and ritual devotion to dance, who danced for 50 years. In The Red Swan he makes a dance confession depicting three characters: a female (cabaret dancer), a male (samurai), and the creature (the dying swan, traditionally danced by female dancers). In the final scene, Husein is driving his own bicycle on the stage, offering an introduction of himself as an off-stage personality, thus blurring the boundaries between stage and reality, a role and real-life personality, performance and identity. Going through diverse identity positions, Shukarova and Husein gently refract the gaze with movements and images that  dysregulate the ballet vertical body, and step away from the position that is expected in the canonised role that Husein as a (male) artist had in a national ballet institution. Incorporating, in a postmodernist vein, dance movements alien to the ballet repertoire, such as clubbing, cabaret, everyday movement, non-normative gendered movement, while the iconic male ballet dancer performs a grieving female character entranced in love, they make the ballet institution and its hierarchy crumble. Setting Husein’s ageing body on the stage, Shukarova undermines the ballet body norms that demand a perfect, youthful, upright, and geometrically precise body. The very presence of the choreographer herself on stage, visible, sitting and giving live instructions to Husein, discloses the power hierarchies and institutional/ social apparatus that stage the allegedly ethereal bodies of ballet dancers on stage, while simultaneously demonstrate the difficulty of performing and memorising movement vocabulary by an ageing ballet body. This performance can be defined as proto-queer, since it dysregulates the norms (on stage as well as in private life), re-figures the ballet dancer’s body and queers it into a body of a person whose privacy is affected through movements and images on the stage.