Swan Lake Ending

No dying swan tonight...

Choreographer and ballerina discussion...

Denys: We have a choice of five endings: one happy through good defeating evil, one tragic self-sacrifice, and three tragic finales with evil defeating good.

Maya: I guess we do one of the tragic endings?

Denys: This audience likes happy endings. So we'll have Sergei pull the wing off Von Rothbart, who then dies. Odette doesn't die, and she and Sergei are united.

Maya: I don’t die? No dying swan?

Denys: The audience likes to see you go out victorious. Good triumphs over evil.

Maya: But life does not always have happy endings. Not in the Ukraine. Not anywhere.

Denys: But it’s what people expect in a story.

_______

Voice-over

Basic versions of the Swan Lake endings include:

The good live happily ever after…

Siegfried tears off Von Rothbart’s wing and he dies (as above). Odette and Siegfried are united.

The good triumph through self-sacrifice…

Odette commits suicide, Siegfried follows her, Von Rothbart’s power is destroyed.

The bad win triggering a tragic ending…

Odette is devastated by Siegfried’s betrayal, remains a swan, Siegfried grieves.

Odette forgives Siegfried, brief reconciliation, but Von Rothbart defeats Siegfried in a storm.

Rothbart kills Siegfried, then carries Odette off with him.

...

Outliers Lurk Before They Leap

Enter the black swan

At ballet rehearsal:

Director: Everything is going smoothly, the four cygnets do their triddle-traddle across the stage, nice contrast with da-dah! Entrance of you as Odile, the black swan.

Svetlana: Very metaphorical.

Director: The black swan was already a metaphor for the unexpected event caused by an outlier. Tchaikovsky put it in his ballet, and Joseph Schumpeter may have been thinking “black swan” when he proposed “creative destruction.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb extended it to history, science, finance and technology and then Clayton Christensen called it by another name, “disruptive innovation” referring mainly to technology.

Svetlana: So the story of Swan Lake is a metaphor for business?

Director: Not yet, but someone’s bound to latch onto it.

____________

Voice-over

For a short film on "Disruptive Innovation" go here

http://youtu.be/itEn46Pcq_Y

What more can we say?

Art foreshadows science. 
Outliers lurk before they leap.