Karen Kain's Swan Song probes her own growing pains — and ballet's

In a regal, dark green gown, Canadian performer Karen Kain walked Toronto International Film Festival's red carpet earlier this month with a smile on her face.

Her obvious excitement came from both the culmination of years of work on a specific project — and more than half a century's worth of work in her art. 

"I just feel so astonished and grateful," Kain said to CBC News.

"At this point in my life, when I'm no longer performing or dancing, to have this wonderful film come out — I just think it's such a gift."

Kain, 72, was speaking of her documentary Swan Song, which follows her career as one of the most celebrated ballerinas in the country's history. She said that along with serving as one of the crowning artistic achievements of her career, Swan Song exists as just that: a swan song of her 50 years with the National Ballet of Canada. 

But instead of simply looking at Kain's decades-long vocation as a dancer, she said, its creators did something more. 

Alongside documenting Kain's rise from a young ballerina in Mississauga, Ont., to a run as the prima ballerina at the National Ballet for more than two decades, it takes a somewhat probative look at her accomplishments and struggles as the ballet company's artistic director after that — although it focuses specifically on the last three years. 

Looking back, that includes her near spur-of-the-moment instillation as the lead dancer in a 1971 production of Swan Lake, replacing an injured dancer only two years after graduating from Canada's National Ballet School.

Kain also looks back at her sustained partnership and mentorship by Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev as she embarked on a whirlwind career that exposed a perfectionist streak.

That streak would simultaneously launch her to stratospheric heights and lead her to develop such a demanding and rigorous standard of excellence for herself that she once described her entire career, and dance in general, as not fun in the moment. To her, it was simply something to feel a sense of accomplishment over completing when the music had stopped. In the documentary itself, a wry Kain gives a sardonic laugh when reading the old article in which she delivered that quote.

But the documentary focuses more on the struggles of the National Ballet of Canada — which Kain took over as artistic director in 2005, when the company was in dire financial straits.

Only after righting that ship, and reshaping it into a once-again world-renowned name,did she reach the twin challenges Swan Song overwhelmingly concerns itself with. Those challenges were the COVID-19 pandemic — when the company's entire 2020-2021 slate was cancelled — and a wider attempt to connect with and reflect the interests of a young generation of dancers.

That culminated in the accidentally caught issue of racism embedded in the traditions of dance. During a 2020 production of Swan Lake, led by Kain as her last production before retirement, filmmakers captured a number of supporting dancers arguing for the right to dance without tights.

Those dancers, who were not white, argued that the protocol of wearing solely white tights was unnatural for them — the tradition of wearing tights in ballet is based on creating a seamless picture of the dancers' bodies, with the colour choice based on the majority white dancers in the field from its inception.