When fossil fuels pollute Swan Lake: Provocative ballet opens in Brisbane
'I'm not interested just to do beautiful things,' Angelin Preljocaj said.
'Art is not just to be beautiful – it has to talk about humanity, and what happens in our world.
'And the idea is to put Swan Lake in the context of the climatic problem.'
Preljocaj was speaking in Brisbane ahead of the opening of his production, which has an exclusive season as part of the QPAC International Series.
The series brings world-famous performing arts companies such as the Bolshoi Ballet and the Teatro alla Scala exclusively to Queensland, bypassing Sydney and Melbourne.
Arts Minister John-Paul Langbroek said the series had injected more than $32 million into the Queensland economy since its inception in 2009.
The Ballet Preljocaj visit represents the restart of the series after COVID.
First performed in 1877 and proclaimed a failure, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake – about a prince, Siegfried, who falls in love with a woman, Odette, cursed by a magician to turn into a swan by day – would go on to become the most popular and iconic ballet in the canon.
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