“The Sleeping Beauty”
American Ballet Theatre
Opera House, The J.F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
January 30, 2008
by George Jackson
copyright 2008 by George Jackson
By this second of ABT’s seven “Beauty” performances in Washington my eyes had adjusted. I was focusing on stretched legs and pointed feet. Quite a few of those feet were arched elegantly. Arms and hands, although less expressive, did move to the music. The coordination of motion into ensembles of limbs was proper. What I had learned was to not look at whole bodies! It had been a shock the night before to see dancing by body parts and not people. After a week of the Kirov’s “La Bayadere” in which each Slave or Shade displayed personality from torso to finger tip and toe, missing in ABT was the dancing’s anatomic soul.
After a while, one stops looking for what isn’t there and, to be fair, the ABT dancers loosened up and assembled themselves a bit during the course of opening night. The “Beauty” that followed the opening was to have been with Herman Cornejo as Prince Desire. Injury has sidelined Cornejo, who is the company’s top virtuoso. Being super-agile and short, he’s right for this ballet’s Bluebird. He’s not, however, a priori suited for Prince roles. The experiment of casting him heroically is postponed for now and in his place we had Jose Manuel Carreno, who still looks a Prince, even when only making an entrance.
It had been a long wait to see someone of fully impressive demeanor take the stage because the Prince doesn’t appear until Act 2, after the Sleeping Beauty has slept a hundred years. Up to Carreno’s entrance, the kingdom we beheld seemed minor. Xiomara Reyes, as its sleeping Princess, made negligible impact. Maria Riccetto’s spinsterish Lilac Fairy and Roman Zhurbin’s gruff King might have been your neighbors next door rather than beings from the realms of magic and royalty. Maria Bystrova, as this King’s Queen, must have brought along from her grander parental home Clinton Luckett’s Catalabutte to aid her when she had married down; these two seemed to remembered how the high and mighty behave. Nancy Raffa, too, gave the envious Carabosse some dimension and more than a dollop of spice. The three of them, though, didn’t succeed in changing the Lilliput tone around them.
Carreno was worth watching throughout Acts 2 and 3. Although he’s past peak in looks and technique, his dancing remains spacious (it isn't as fleet) and his image (more solid now) retains a modeled contour. At the wedding celebration in Act 3, Sarah Lane’s Princess Florine made an impact right away, but didn’t sustain it throughout the Bluebird duo she shared with Carlos Lopez. Charles Barker conducted the Kennedy Center’s Opera House Orchestra in the Tchaikovsky music.
As a production of Marius Petipa’s greatest ballet, this ABT version was condemned by just about everyone when it premiered last summer in New York. A salvage operation is now going on and the process – particularly the replacement of garish costumes - will take time. One of Petipa’s purposes in “The Sleeping Beauty” was political. He and his collaborators in 1890 intended to display an enlightened although absolute ruler and his court in an entertaining and elegant way. The ballet’s reliance on fairytale magic and allusions to Greek mythology (and not directly to Christian symbolism as in Bournonville’s “A Folk Tale”) was deliberate. By implication the Romanov Czar’s regime that sponsored this “Beauty” was shown as being tolerant and viable. The action proclaims the divine rights of the ruler and the legitimacy of dynastic succession. Plans existed (prior to the Diaghilev Ballets Russes’ 1909 debut in Paris) to take “Beauty” from St. Petersburg west – as propaganda for Russia’s art and institutions. Twice a Paris engagement had to be cancelled (once because of problems with the theater that had been booked; the other time because of the start of the Russian-Japanese War). “Beauty” did get to Budapest but no further. What would have been the consequences for the course of the artform if “Beauty” had reached Paris before Diaghilev’s reformed version of Russian ballet? In Russia, for certain, “Beauty” did not stop the revolution against the Czar.
Whether any of this background is relevant to staging and dancing the ballet today is arguable. Still, it explains things in the story situation and dramatic action that otherwise seem arbitrary. What a quandary for any current director! Not at issue ought to be getting a cast that can do whole bodied dancing grandly.
