In This Edition:
-Podcast of A Review of Paris Opera’s Sleeping Beauty
-The Text of the Review in English
-Where to Watch 6 Different Versions of Sleeping Beauty
-The Review in French/La critique en français
Revolution and Reverie: Paris Opera Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty at the Bastille
THE CONTEXT
Seeing the Paris Opera Ballet in The Sleeping Beauty, or La Belle au Bois Dormant, is to look down history’s kaleidoscopic tunnel. A deluge of rotating tutus, rising monarchies, falling empires, exiled artists, fairy tales, and waves of Russian, French, and Soviet history are embedded in the costumes of fairies, pages, and princesses. At the same time, it’s a conversation in contradictions.
This most opulent and classical of ballets, based on a fairy tale written in 1697 by Charles Perrault as an homage to the French monarchy, is performed not in the traditional 150-year-old Palais Garnier theater, but in the modern, cold, cool, and stark Bastille—a theater inaugurated in commemoration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Here we have a ballet revering the ideals of an antiquated state, in a theater built to commend and commemorate the revolution.
The story was originally adopted by the imperial Russian court during a surge in nationalism following the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the last reform-minded czar. The state was bracing against revolution, holding tighter to myths of divine monarchy (will we ever learn?). Layered onto that is the later history of revolution—and Rudolf Nureyev’s defection and subsequent exile.
The original choreography is by the prolific Marius Petipa, and while the overall structure and iconic scenes remain—like the Rose Adagio and the fairy variations in the prologue—the version POB performs is by Nureyev, who served as Artistic Director from 1983 to 1989. During his tenure, he staged his own versions of many classics, commissioned major contemporary works like William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987), and famously promoted Sylvie Guillem to Étoile at the age of 19 in 1984, unorthodoxly leapfrogging her over several ranks.
Nureyev was a beloved star in the Soviet Union. He defected in June 1961 while on tour in Paris, landing in a life of both freedom and near permanent estrangement. His dramatic escape humiliated the Soviet state, a stain on their propaganda project—if Soviet society was so superior, why were its greatest artists fleeing? His family was harassed and his father’s military career was reportedly destroyed. While countless serfs had suffered under the czars, many—including Nureyev—also suffered under the Soviet regime and carried with them a complex nostalgia for the era that preceded it. That longing is felt in Nureyev’s Sleeping Beauty—a staging that honors the fairy tale’s monarchical origins, perhaps also mourning a vanished imperial Russia.
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The REVIEW
The Prelude: A Cursed Blessing
The prelude is the most famous part of Sleeping Beauty—the moment when fairies gather to bestow gifts upon the newborn Princess Aurora: grace, beauty, courage, song—all the things a princess needs to function as an aspirational member of society. It’s also where the point of tension is introduced and Carabosse, the malevolent fairy left off the invitation list, crashes the celebration and curses Aurora to die at sixteen, just as she would be preparing to enter society. Carabosse is often played with more than a touch of theatrical humor—a serious threat, certainly, but sometimes camp or caricature, depending on the company and the dancer. At Paris Opera Ballet, her menace is quieter, more elegant. Fanny Gorse plays her as an understated danger, like a well-heeled politician whose destructive power lies beneath a façade of stately refinement. There’s some irony, as there always is in this role, but Gorse gives us a Carabosse who could have been just like the other fairies—had life unfolded differently. Instead, her powers are putrefied in malice.
Technical Purity, Parisian Control
Technically speaking, Sleeping Beauty is considered the purest of the classical ballets. The choreography is crystalline—there’s nowhere to hide. Unlike Swan Lake, where dramatic flair can mask a slip in form (or a slip in form can enhance the dramatic), Beauty demands absolute cla...
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