Swan Lake premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1877. The costumes and décor looked drab; critics had fun making fun of it; tickets went unsold. It failed. Vladimir Begichev’s scenario drew from Russian and German legends as well as the music dramas of Richard Wagner. Tchaikovsky wrote the music, less out of interest in ballet (which he knew almost nothing about at the time) than financial exigency: he needed the income. The Czech choreographer Julius Reisinger created the dances by recycling steps from other ballets when convenient. His successor at the Bolshoi, Joseph Hansen, retooled the dances for performances in 1880 and 1882. Then, oblivion – until 1895, two years after Tchaikovsky’s death, when the illustrious choreographer Marius Petipa and his assistant Lev Ivanov revived Swan Lake for the Mariyinsky Theater in St Petersburg.

This production, the first that ended up mattering, was a tribute of sorts to Tchaikovsky, who had, in his later years, given Petipa and Ivanov the illustrious scores for The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. To make Swan Lake a success in St Petersburg, however, Petipa decided that the score needed some repairs. The task fell to Riccardo Drigo, in-house composer and conductor at the Mariyinsky. His changes included thickening the orchestration, inserting additional material in the form of his orchestrations of Tchaikovsky piano pieces, moving a pas de deux from act I to act III (now known as the Black Swan pas de deux), resorting the dances of Act 1, cutting a pas de six (or pas de cinq, in Reisinger’s original conception) from Act 3, eliminating a subplot and making the ending more hopeful. This bowdlerized version made the ballet famous, but scrambled the logic of the music and left the fates of some characters unclear. Fanfares sounded in the wrong places, and Prince Siegfried’s friend Benno disappeared after Act 1.

Even so, in any and every incarnation, Swan Lake remains a showcase for the world’s greatest ballerinas, including Natalia Osipova, who performs the double role of Odette/Odile in a production by the Royal Ballet at London’s Covent Garden. The first production dates from 1987; this is a 2015 revival of a 2000 revival. It includes steps by Frederick Ashton and excludes the Russian dance of Act 3, but the Ivanov/Petipa conception remains more or less intact. Focus falls on the fate of Odette, a princess protected by her grandfather’s magic against her evil stepmother. Odette and her girlfriends live in disguise: At night they are free to be human, but during the day they change into swans swimming on a lake of tears. Love and marriage will save her, and will come thanks to Prince Siegfried, an aimless fellow whose mother wants him to get married. The wedding is arranged, but dark forces intercede, and in her stead Odette’s dressed-in-black double, Odile, appears. She is an agent of a demon, Baron von Rothbart. (The connection between him and the evil stepmother is never made clear.) Mistaking Odile for his true love, the Prince declares her his bride. When the trick is exposed, the stage darkens, and Odette returns to her avian existence. Siegfried begs her forgiveness to no avail, and Odette dies in his arms.

Osipova is stunning as Odette/Odile. Floating in the air seems easier for her than standing on the ground. She keeps her face tense, and the turns at the end of her variations suggest panic, dread at what’s in store for her. Unimpressed by the slow pace of the proceedings, she indulges in some quirks. She adds arabesques to the side in her Act 2 variation, for example, asserting that this is her show. Everyone and everything else on stage seems superfluous. The ballet critic for The Telegraph, Mark Monahan, thought the production overstuffed.

The dwarves might be forgiven along with the other details in Swan Lake that make little sense or leave questions hanging in the air. Ultimately the ballet’s meanings are always contingent, since, like other masterpieces made authorless through foreign musical and choreographic interventions, Swan Lake is less a single work than a collection of ideas.

Its openness, along with its dominance in the repertoire, has made the ballet irresistible to iconoclastic choreographers like Jean-Christophe Maillot. His complicated adaptation, which premiered in Monaco in 2011, is titled Lac, French for lake, though he might also have been punning on lack, in the psychoanalytic sense. His production represents primal loss, desire and how the hues of the world come to be reduced in our psyches to black and white. Maillot is sometimes called a neoclassicist, but he is also a primitivist with affection for street and club dances. He strips ballet to the basics, without the familiar épaulements and enchainments.

The plot transposes the original scenario into a realm that Sigmund Freud might have recognized – or perhaps Freud as filtered through Jean Cocteau or Roman Polanski. (The prologue of Lac is in fact a short black and white film; the ballet proper begins with Act 1.) The big difference in the dramatis personae is the presence of a father figure who wears silver and bronze clothes along with a thin metal crown. It turns out that he and the Majesty of the Night were lovers; she bore him a child, a girl (later a black swan). Siegfried’s father is oppressive, his mother overbearing, and both want him to leave childish things behind, pass through adolescence and choose a bride. Cue a strange parade of suitors, including a maiden called ‘the insatiable one’, but the boy prefers a girl (later a white swan). Her Majesty intercedes to insist that Siegfried be with the girl in black, his half-sister.

The plot is a muddle, but so is that of the original ballet. Thus Maillot and his scenarist, the writer Jean Rouaud, cannot be faulted for reinterpreting it. The scaffolding of the original remains with the trappings of typical characters and unmusical gimmicks stripped away. His version pointedly avoids the 32 fouetté turns that Pierina Legnani and other ballerinas employed by the Russian imperial theatres inserted into the familiar Petipa/Ivanov version during the late nineteenth century.

Maillot has imagined a ballet of primal fears. Day might not follow night; parents might instil fear when they should provide comfort; the erotic impulse could be less human than bestial. We all have such nightmares, and all things pass into the night. The boy wants to keep his innocence and hold on to the happier if haunted times (according to the filmed prelude) he spent with his playmate in white. In the final act, Maillot dispatches the principal characters in quick order, and the sum of all fears is revealed. A black sheet drops down onto the stage. It goes back up, but the bodies are gone, the stage empty.

As for the music, Maillot puts it through a blender, adding doses of Acts 3, 2 and 4 to Act 1 in that order. (The film has a soundtrack of its own, but the composer, or curator, of the electronics is unidentified.) Never mind the pas de six, or pas de cinq – Maillot has no interest in following the score that Tchaikovsky composed for Begichev in his first attempt at ballet. Tchaikovsky produced about two-and-a-half hours of music, taking into account all of the repeats, which Maillot reduces to 90 minutes. The result is tense, terse and a lot to take in.

Alexander Ekman’s A Swan Lake, which premiered in 2014 in Oslo, is much less sophisticated but much more provocative. Whereas Maillot is non-balletic, Ekman is anti-balletic. Nothing of the original scenario remains in his treatment except for Odette/Odile and a vague suggestion of good versus evil. Tchaikovsky’s music is also gone, except as remixed, in Act 1, by the Swedish-born, New York-based composer Mikael Karlsson. Karlsson writes popular and classical music for theatre as well as music for film and video games. According to his website, he trained at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and likes to wear skeleton T-shirts. Note too that ‘the score for his piece Nasty Fucker was published in Butt Magazine’.

For A Swan Lake, which he composed/arranged in collaboration with Michael Atkinson, Karlsson pilfered Tchaikovsky’s great tunes and adopted his habit of dispersing melodic material over multiple registers. Act 2 has more original music than Act 1, but both are blatantly derivative. Karlsson parodies Tchaikovsky’s famous, repetitive swan theme by tripling the length of the opening minor chord and slowing down the oboe solo. Then he adds a harp and a solo violin before throwing the rest of orchestra at the tune. Clarinets throb; bassoons chortle. The music, recorded with great depth of focus, morphs into a kind of Broadway version of one of John Adams’s agitated instrumental textures. I feared the swans getting radiated by Doctor Atomic.

The staging translates a pile of cash into an absurdist meta-parable about the mysteriousness of swans and the 1877 creative process, as Ekman playfully reimagines it. Act 1, an extended song-and-dance routine, derives from musicals like A Chorus Line. The whole work is reduced to a sales pitch: the idea of making a ballet in which humans turn into swans is giddily presented to a ballet administrator by a ballet master, who snorts in disgust at the foolishness of it all. An ornithologist helps make the case.

The lighting and costuming is gorgeous, with pastel yellows and whites in Act 1, the colours of ducks and swans, followed by glimmers of silver in Act 2. Beneath the moon, Ekman’s dancers splish, splash and slide around in an oft-refilled 16X16-metre puddle. The splashes are choreographed backwards to avoid spilling into the orchestra pit and threatening the Stradivari violins. The liner notes for the DVD describe the water sport as a ‘black meets white’ ‘beach party’. It is joyful, and certainly meant to be liberating, but there is no refuting the consensus, among ballet’s cognoscenti, that Ekman is less a choreographer than a showman. For those who loathe ballet – its abused women, its alpha males, the bad romances, the alt-right conservatism – here is an antidote. Ekman is said to think outside the box, but perhaps having the budget to indulge every whim results in mere indulgence. (Bath time is lots of fun, sure, but filling the stage with rubber ducks?) He applied sandpaper to pointe shoes to give his dancers some grip in the water, but not before some of them had to be treated for concussions. The risk became part of the production, such that the cygnets wear crash helmets. No need to fret the corps de ballet failing to get its act together; here anything goes, except movement in sync.

Ekman does not know the history of the original Swan Lake: how Begichev assembled the scenario, Tchaikovsky conceived the music, and Reisinger stitched together his dances. And indeed, neither do we. The archival sleuth Sergei Konaev, who discovered the 1877 violin rehearsal score in the archive of the Bolshoi Theater, is at least getting close to the truth.

And what would we do with the truth if we had it? The original Swan Lake, which had a limited Bolshoi Theatre run, concluded with the lovers, Odette and Siegfried, drowning in a flood after a hurricane. The special effects, engineered by the Bolshoi’s machinist Karl Valts, made it hard to hear Tchaikovsky’s sunrise music. The audience left sad. Ekman gives us the flood again, but without the tears.