the dying swan

At the Spring Dance Concert in the Culbreth Theatre, "transdisciplinary" artist Emma Block created a haunting and deeply intimate performance with her piece, the dying swan. Though physically executed as a solo, the playbill deliberately credits classical ballet icon Anna Pavlova as both co-choreographer and co-performer, immediately establishing the work as a somatic dialogue across time. Stripped of traditional balletic ornamentation in a simple nude leotard, Emma used a single, unconventional source of illumination: a theater ghost light. The soundscape layers archival clips from the 1935 documentary The Immortal Swan with the resonant cello of Yo-Yo Ma playing Saint-Saëns’s "The Swan," grounding the atmosphere of the piece in a heavy, historical melancholy.

A single bulb burns in the dark, 

                                                                                      A wire cage, a silent 

                                                                                     spark. 

                             The cello weeps a heavy thread, 

                                                              Waking the swan we thought was dead.

The organization of the piece functioned less as a traditional beginning-middle-end narrative and more as an emotional accumulation, a gradual reckoning with embodied memory. The performance opened with Emma walking onto the stage and draping a classical tutu over the ghost light. As the documentary audio tells of Pavlova’s immortalized beauty and virtuosity, Emma does not attempt to replicate the classical ballet form. Instead, she engages the ghost light as an active partner. This visual juxtaposition evokes a profound narrative association: the ghost light, wearing the tutu, becomes a literal and figurative stand-in for Pavlova, the rigid expectations of Euro-Western ballet, and the lingering "ghosts" of the art form's demanding legacy.

Tulle            and               wire,                        bone            and            breath, 

A                                              perfect form                          demanding death. 

The ghost light wears                                      the feathered crown, 

                                    Pulling the living dancer down.

Emma’s movement vocabulary starkly contrasts the verticality and illusion of weightlessness inherent to ballet. Much like in partnered work, she shares and negotiates weight with the heavy, metallic stand of the ghost light. She glides, slides, dips, and intertwines her body with the rigid apparatus. She traverses the entire stage, yet she remains tethered to this glowing focal point. Her energy qualities shift dynamically between whimsical intimacy and heavy, grounded resistance, creating a palpable tension between the desire to honor the past and the physical need to break free from its strict anatomical constraints. Rather than projecting outward for spectator-centric enjoyment, Emma’s focus remains deeply internal and investigative. The kinesthetic empathy generated here suggests she is taking part in the unlearning of the restrictive confines of her decade-long ballet training, seeking instead a connection with a figure bound to her by a shared, complicated artistic past (I loved this!).

This accumulation of tension reaches its climax as Emma brings the piece to the floor, taking the ghost light down with her. She enters the small pool of illumination emanating from beneath the tutu, lingering in a space of visible, almost claustrophobic struggle. Her body contorts and yields to the floor. In this confined light, she appears to physically wrestle with the psychological weight of this artistic lineage, effectively turning the performance into a space of profound therapeutic reclamation. Finally, she removes the tutu from the lamp, tosses it decisively to the floor, and walks off stage as the ghost light extinguishes.

The bulb goes black, 

                       the feathers fall, 

                                      No longer bound by 

                                                   the curtain call. 

                                                            The immortal swan is 

                                                                             left behind, 

                                                                                             A 

                                                                                                mortal 

                                                                                                      body, 

                                                                                                             unconfined.

In this striking final image, Emma successfully sheds the inherited skin of the "immortal swan," stepping out of the shadow of the past and into her own fully realized, embodied autonomy.