About five years ago, Karen Kain set out to bestow a parting gift on the National Ballet of Canada, the company to which she had devoted her beautiful 50-year career, first as ballerina, then as artistic director. She wanted to leave the troupe with a Swan Lake that exposed the story’s feminist undercurrent—that the heroine is trapped in an unhappy alliance with one man (or wizard, anyway) and betrayed by another, with only her sisterhood of swans deserving her trust. Kain had the perfect choreographer for the assignment, resident artist Robert Binet, whose arresting works are also experiments in ballet gender and form. At the 2022 premiere, critics were sharply, if predictably, divided. Some were excited by the vision (and that there was a vision); others were appalled by the messy ensemble bits, the inattention to the glorious music, and the sheer audacity of meddling with a classic (though a classic invites such interference by definition). The ballet is back this month. I’d go. Big productions tend to work out their kinks on the second round so it’s clearer what’s there and what isn’t. —Apollinaire Scherr