Photo by Simon Annand
The innovative English choreographer Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, seen in a U.S. tour recently, will be shown on PBS' Great Performances on April 25, at 10 p.m.
This completes Bourne's treatment of the three most famous Tchaikovsky ballet pieces, after the 1992 Nutcracker and 1995 Swan Lake — both radically different from the scores of realizations by other choreographers.
Perrault's fairy tale was originally turned into a legendary ballet by Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa in 1890. Bourne takes this date as his starting point, setting the christening of Aurora, the story's heroine, in the year of the ballet's first performance; the height of the fin de siècle period when fairies, vampires and decadent opulence fed the gothic imagination.
As Aurora grows into a young woman (Hannah Vassallo), we move forwards in time to the more rigid, uptight Edwardian era; a mythical golden age of long summer afternoons, croquet on the lawn and new dance crazes. Years later, awakening from her century long slumber, Aurora finds herself in the modern day; a world more mysterious and wonderful than any fairy story.
Bourne's collaborators are the Tony- and Olivier-award winning designers Lez Brotherston (set and costumes), Paule Constable (lighting) and Paul Groothuis (sound). Carabosse-Caradoc is danced by Adam Maskell, Leo by Dominic North, and Count Lilac by Christopher Marney