What thirty-two swans actually costs
The corps de ballet is the most expensive thing in the building, and the first thing every house is advised to cut.
A full Swan Lake lakeside needs thirty-two swans on stage. Most companies our size dance twenty-four, which works, reads properly from the grand circle, and saves roughly £84,000 across a run.
We dance thirty-two, and the reason is not sentiment. The lakeside acts are built on canon — a phrase begins at one end of the line and travels. Below about twenty-eight dancers the line is too short for the delay to register as anything except imprecision. The effect that Ivanov wrote is not decorative repetition; it is a wave, and a wave needs distance.
What it costs is the eight extra contracts, the rehearsal hours those dancers need in everything else in the season, and the wing space they occupy. What it buys is about ninety seconds of the second act.
We think that is a reasonable trade. We accept it is arguable.