Keywords: Digital Heritage; Dance Studies; Database Aesthetics; Reworking; Narrative Engagement.

While Performance Studies has long contested static views of the ballet canon (Foster 1996; Taylor 2003), the affordances of contemporary choreographic practice still tend to be theorized through frameworks of embodiment, repertoire, and intertextuality, rather than through the structural logic of digital media. This paper proposes that Digital Humanities offers a productive reframing: the choreographic methodology of “reworking” (Midgelow 2007) can be read as a critical operation upon the canon understood as a database in Manovich’s (2001) sense — a structured set of constituent elements available for query, recombination, and re-encoding. Our central claim is that three contemporary reworkings of Swan Lake — by Matthew Bourne, Angelin Preljocaj, and Alexander Ekman — instantiate three distinct types of database operation upon the canon, and that this comparative typology constitutes a transferable methodological model for the critical and speculative strands of DH.

Our use of Manovich’s database concept is heuristic rather than ontological: we do not claim that the Swan Lake libretto is a database in any formal-computational sense, but that reading the canon through the database/narrative opposition Manovich elaborates makes visible operations of selection, recombination, and re-encoding that traditional narrative analysis tends to obscure. Manovich frames database and narrative as competing cultural logics: where narrative imposes cause-and-effect trajectories, the database presents the world as a structured collection of addressable items. The traditional Swan Lake presents itself as the former. The reworkings analyzed here, however, perform a critical re-mediation (Bolter / Grusin 1999): they decompose the canonical narrative into its constituent elements — swan, prince, spell, corps de ballet formation, white/black binary — and treat these as data points that can be re-queried, re-combined, and re-encoded. In this sense, “reworking” is not metaphorically like a database operation; it is a critical practice that makes available database-like operations on a cultural form historically governed by narrative closure.

The paper engages directly the conference theme of “Engagement” and its sub-theme of “Remembering” by asking how a paradigmatic site of cultural memory — Swan Lake’s near-saturating ubiquity in the global ballet imaginary — is critically accessed and modified. Our analytical apparatus draws on three convergent traditions: Barthes’s (1957) demystification of cultural forms presenting themselves as natural; Butler’s (1990) account of gender as performative iteration, which provides analytical purchase on Bourne’s intervention; and Taylor’s (2003) distinction between archive and repertoire, which we extend by proposing that digital-cultural logics offer a third term — the canon as queryable corpus — that mediates between the fixity of the archive and the mutability of embodied repertoire. The paper examines three distinct reworkings of Swan Lake as instances of this operation:

Matthew Bourne (1995): Structural Inversion

Bourne’s all-male corps de ballet effects what we term a structural inversion: the gendered casting of the canonical libretto is treated as a parameter rather than as a constitutive given. Read through Butler (1990), the production demonstrates that the apparent naturalness of the heteronormative pas de deux is an effect of citational repetition, not of formal necessity; the choreographic grammar remains legible — indeed, more legible as grammar — once the gendered variables are reassigned. In database terms, Bourne queries the canon with a different filter on the gender field; the narrative engine continues to produce coherent output, exposing the contingency of the original parameterization.

Angelin Preljocaj (2020): Multimedial Overwriting

Preljocaj’s production foregrounds the most explicit intersection with digital aesthetics: monumental video projections, a soundscape that overlays industrial electronic textures onto Tchaikovsky, and a narrative that recasts the antagonist as a real-estate developer threatening an ecologically vulnerable landscape. Crucially, the digital here operates on two levels that should not be conflated: as medium (the projection and sound apparatus) and as figure (the glitch aesthetics and artificial lighting that signify capitalist-extractive force within the diegesis). This double register allows the production to perform what we term multimedial overwriting: the canonical libretto is preserved as substrate but is rendered illegible without the digital interface that mediates it. The ecological critique becomes legible precisely through this layered re-encoding, addressing an audience habituated to screen-based regimes of attention.

Alexander Ekman (2014): Material Collision

Ekman’s production explicitly stages the conflict between archive and corporeal repertoire. Documentary-style projections narrate the ballet’s institutional history while the stage is flooded with 5,000 liters of water through which dancers must move. The result is a deliberate friction — what Salter (2010) terms an entanglement — between the smooth temporality of the digital record and the resistant, intractable materiality of wet bodies in motion. Ekman does not reject the digital; he stages a collision in which the seamlessness of mediated memory is disrupted by the irreducible thickness of live performance, forcing the audience into active negotiation between two regimes of inscription.

Taken together, these three modes of reworking — structural inversion, multimedial overwriting, material collision — constitute a typology of database operations upon the canon that we propose as a methodological contribution to the critical and speculative strands of Digital Humanities (Risam 2018; Sayers 2017; Dixon 2007). The wager of this approach is that the preservation of intangible heritage, when understood through DH, need not consist in fixing forms in digital archives; it may instead consist in keeping cultural code open to critical execution. The model is in principle transferable: opera, ritual practice, oral epic, and other narrative-bound cultural forms can be approached as queryable corpora subject to analogous critical operations. Swan Lake makes the case visible because of the very rigidity of its canonization; the methodological argument extends well beyond it. By recycling canonical material under critical pressure, contemporary ballet becomes a form of reflexive practice that engages cultural memory not as a closed inheritance but as an evolving corpus requiring active, critical, and creative re-execution.