The Sleeping Beauty

New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
January 3, 2007

This is not your mother’s Sleeping Beauty, as everyone who has already seen and weighed in on Peter Martins’s production knows. I know that some people will want to close their eyes at this production (as Balanchine said, if you don’t like the dancing you can always close your eyes and just listen to the music, which is rich and luxurious and shimmering), but I did not; I was pretty happy watching a lot of enjoyable dancing for a couple of hours. Nonetheless, the grievances of the eyes-closed advocates are, I am afraid, mostly legitimate.

Sleeping Beauty is a ballet that is about, to a great extent, time and its passage; and the ballet itself requires time; time to unfold, time to allow the audience to savor its details; it can’t be rushed. Thus any cutting must be done with care. This is the biggest flaw of the NYCB production; everything seems so hurried that hardly any one has the time to pay attention to detail. The existence of the story line seems to be somewhat of an embarrasment that has to be fit into the corners of the dancing, rather than the platform on which both the music and the choreography are based. The choreography is impatient of the plot, and as a result the dancers have nothing to hold on to. Cutting is easier, and perhaps even desirable, for a ballet like Swan Lake, which has too much non-dancing filler, and which Balanchine rightly cut down to emphasize the most essential elements. It can’t work like that for a ballet like Sleeping Beauty where the superfluities are much less, and where every piece of the plot, from the birth celebration and the spell to the birthday to the false death to the awakening to the wedding, must all be given their due. The most successful and satisfying part of the production is, consequently, the wedding divertissement.

The other big missing piece of this Sleeping Beauty puzzle is one that is not really worth discussing, because not much can be done about it, and this is simply the fact that the dancers are just not trained to dance this ballet the way it needs to be danced. In order to better articulate what was missing, I watched the Royal Ballet’s ca. 1994 production, with Viviana Durante and Zoltán Solymosi, and Benazir Hussein as Lilac (this is the production with the off-kilter sets by Maria Bjornson, which I saw at the Met, but I can’t remember who danced); and of course, you can always watch Fonteyn do the Rose Adagio over and over; I pretty much have it in my head by now. But watch the Royals; see how they use their backs and arms and eyes; see the care they take to perform each step, as though it really mattered; see how all of them—from Lilac and the other soloist fairies to Lilac’s attendants in the Prologue—fill out every phrase in the music, down to their very fingertips, each girl, no exceptions. The only one who used her arms to eat up space in the NYCB production was Merrill Ashley as Carabosse; she looked to be having a grand old time, but, like the others, seemed tentative about taking the whole thing seriously. Of the NYCB fairies, while they all danced the steps well, only Alina Dronova, as "Eloquence," had the proper sparkle and wit. Watch also how the Royals perform the finger-pricking scene; they are attentive to the waves of grief and sorrow that the score expresses, and they respond to it; the NYCB production misses the gravitas here. Martins’s placement of the awakening at the opening of the second act, while theoretically seems like a good idea, strangely causes this most important scene to fall flat; everything prior—the lonely prince; the vision; the beautiful traveling music—has been building with great urgency to this very moment; when we don’t get the big payoff we go off to intermission with no conclusion; when we return, the momentum and sense of time has been lost and when it opens the next act, it seems unimportant. There are two important areas, however, in which Martins does very well: his use of children, and the staging of the apotheosis. The Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is very well done, better than any other production I’ve seen. And the closing of the ballet with the crowning of the next generation (whatever anyone wants to read or has read into it) is a wonderfully expressive use of this powerful and awesome—in the true sense of the word; I can’t hear it without the hair on my arms standing up—music. (A few years ago at a Memorial Day service at the Soldiers and Sailors monument on Riverside Drive I saw a soldier perform a dance—I think it was called a sword presentation or something; the word dance wasn’t used, but that’s definitely what it was—to this very music. I was impressed.)

So let’s talk Auroras. On Wednesday night it was Whelan, and from my very beautiful first row seat in the second ring, she looked tentative in the myriad difficulties of the first act. In some ways, it’s good to see her do something that is a real challenge. She hung on and finished all the hard things; but there was not much in the way of characterization. The only complete Rose Adagio melt down I’ve ever seen occurred a couple of years ago, at the Paris Opéra Ballet. The Aurora that night was Mélanie Hurel, who was clearly a beautiful dancer, but she had the Rose Adagio of any ballerina’s nightmares. It began with her having to put her raised leg down from attitude to steady herself, and from there things just got worse and worse until she finally fell down at the end. To her credit, she came back and performed well for the rest of the evening. The last Aurora I saw at the State Theater was Alexandra Ansanelli; I sat in the orchestra, and I, unlike apparently every other person who saw the performance, except maybe her mother, actually thought she was terrific; she has the technique to pull off all the hard stuff, and she was sparkling and charming in the birthday scene. If there was a place that she perhaps fell a bit flat it was in the wedding. (I’m glad to hear she is doing well at the Royal Ballet.) Whelan, after her first act jitters, was much better in the vision (ok, also in the first act in this version), where she used her beautiful, light arabesque to express the scene’s ethereality, but it was in the wedding, which she performed with Nicolaj Hübbe, where she excelled, with her technique, her unerring good taste, her ability to project the grandeur of the choreography and the music. The pas de deux was just beautiful; a work of art; nothing else to say. A few other notable performances: Stephen Hanna in the Gold variation; lovely phrasing and batterie; Tiler Peck, substituting for Sterling Hyltin, in the Emerald variation; Andrew Veyette as the Bluebird (why is that comination in the coda, pas de chat, brisée, arabesque, done in tandem, so wonderful?) and last but not least, Jennie Somogyi as Lilac; her beautiful technique and gracious presence did much to add some depth to a production that, while enjoyable to watch, can teeter too close to the edge of shallowness. But maybe I’m shallow, too; I would watch it again.