Jefferson Public Radio broadcast an As It Was story last month about ballet dancer Janet Reed Erskine, who was born in Tolo, Ore. The story’s sources identified her as Odette the swan queen in the first full-length American production of Swan Lake.
After listening to the story on As It Was, longtime ballerina and Rogue Valley instructor Sylvia Bolton offered clarification she attributed to Janet Reed before her death and to another ballerina, 96-year-old Jacqueline Martin Schumacher, who lives in Portland, Ore.
Bolton said Janet Reed had the role of Odile the black swan in the San Francisco Opera Ballet’s ground-breaking production in 1940, and Martin was Odette the swan queen. The online Wikipedia encyclopedia agrees Reed performed as Odile --- not as Odette as stated by As It Was.
In most productions of Swan Lake, the lead ballerina doubles as Odette and Odile, but the San Francisco version used two dancers. Bolton said Martin was considered the more classical dancer and Reed was a soubrette dancer capable of doing Odile’s difficult pas, variation and coda requiring 32 fouettes turns.
The San Francisco production proved enormously successful.
Sources: "Swan Lake." Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia 6 Jan. 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Lake#Later_productions. Accessed 8 Jan. 2017; "OVERVIEW Janet Reed (1916—2000)." Oxford Reference, Oxford University Press, 2017, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100409881. Accessed 8 Jan. 2017.
