Sleeping Beauty awakes in peaks
Alberta Ballet offers new take on the classic by relocating it to the Rockies
Good versus evil. Princes and princesses. Fairies, magic spells and mountain castles.
Those are some of the story elements that have made The Sleeping Beauty a cornerstone of the classical ballet repertoire since Tchaikovsky ’s musical adaptation of the fairy tale had its première performance in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1890.
Still, it never hurts to blow the dust off an old classic.
In featuring this archetypal drama for its current season, Alberta Ballet adds a little novelty, relocating the story from its European origins to our own backyard, the Canadian Rockies.
But don’t worry, you’ll still see all the best parts.
“It’s a quintessential ballet and this show is constructed and staged in a way that pays tribute to the great history of past productions,” explains choreographer and Alberta Ballet’s associate artistic director Christopher Anderson.
“I’ve added some new choreographic elements, but there are also still a lot of the hallmark moments that you would expect from this ballet.”
For the show ’s backdrops, Alberta Ballet partnered with Curtis Van Charles, who combines photography and his own illustration techniques on computer. His images of the Rockies and forests form the huge hybrid digital prints behind the dancers. Attention was also paid to showing vegetation that’s
representative of forests in the Rockies (no pine beetles, thank you!).
“This was the first time Curtis worked with set design so it was pretty exciting dealing with some of the unique challenges of this production using the high technology that was available. We just hung the drops up for the first time a few days ago and it was incredible and so vivid. I wanted to make it an Alberta Ballet production in both the sets and the setting, to make a local consideration where we placed the story. I’m hoping the audience will feel connected and maybe recognize things.”
He says the show ’s “vivid, colourful costumes will really shine” in this customized environment.
Anderson’s choreography pays a nod to the original vision of Tchaikovsky’s choreographer Marius Petipa, but experience counts for something. He had additional input from the company ’s ballet mistress, Christiana Bennett. They ’ve danced The Sleeping Beauty about 20 times between them.
“There are disputes about which is the real version and some of the details are a little fuzzy. I’ve tried to draw inspiration from productions we have danced, but to maintain hallmarks of Petipa’s style in the placement of the steps and layering of the movements.”
You’ll see key sequences like the Rose Adagio in Act One and variations for the Princess Aurora, but “whether her head is slightly to the left or to the right are where the experts disagree.”
The next task was to trim the show’s length. In its original format, three acts and intermissions left the whole ballet approaching four hours. Now it’s standard practice to make “smart edits.”
“We tried to condense it a bit, to make the evening a bit more concise. It will be about two hours and 15 minutes including the intermission, just a little bit longer than Nutcracker. We discussed which pieces really made sense to the audience, and most importantly, which pieces made sense for the dancers. You want to make the dancers look the best that they can look.”
Sixty dancers complete the production in three separate casts rotating over the Calgary and Edmonton runs: 30 regular company performers, plus students from Alberta Ballet’s Edmonton school as young as 10 years old, and finally, star character dancers. Three ballerinas don tutus to dance the part of Princess Aurora: Jennifer Gibson, Hayna Gutierrez and Luna Sasaki. Three other dancers play the role of Carabosse, the evil fairy.
For Anderson, The Sleeping Beauty is a special project that came together over months of work and ideas gained over years of experience. Raised on the American east coast, he started dance training in Baltimore, Maryland, at 14. His first professional spot involved two years with the Boston Ballet before a move to Salt Lake City, Utah, where he rose to the soloist rank over 15 years.
Along the way, he’s danced lead roles with a long list of international companies, including the role of Carabosse from The Sleeping Beauty. After joining Alberta Ballet in 2015, Anderson got his feet wet choreographing Cinderella for the company’s last season so he knows something about adapting fairy tales to the dance.
For those unfamiliar with the story, it all starts with the christening of a new child, Princess Aurora. But the King and Queen forget to invite the fairy Carabosse. That dark fairy takes his revenge by placing a curse on the child: at her 20th birthday, Aurora will prick her finger and die.
A good force arrives to change things. The Lilac fairy can’t remove the curse but alters it so that Aurora will only sleep. Sure enough, Carabosse shows up in disguise at Aurora’s 20th birthday party with a hidden spindle.
When Aurora pricks herself and falls asleep, the Lilac fairy puts the whole kingdom to sleep. That’s where the intermission pops up in Alberta Ballet’s version.
In the second half, 100 years later, the Lilac fairy lures a new young prince to Aurora’s idyll. After a battle with Carabosse, the prince kisses Aurora. When she awakens, the rest of the kingdom awakens with her. Prince and Princess take the final pas de deux as part of their wedding ceremony.
Anderson says the production packs a few explosions and pyrotechnics along the way.
“Within this period story, we tried to amplify the excitement and accelerate the storytelling.”