Recent advances in athletic technique mean ballet has never seemed so superhuman, its artists so physically daring. Yet what distinguishes ballet from sport is its ability to capture emotion, its virtuosity becoming dead-eyed if amputated from meaning and mood. This month, Stuttgart Ballet takes the Regent Theatre stage for a Melbourne-exclusive season of Marcia Haydée’s The Sleeping Beauty, a bracing reminder that the world’s best ballet companies place extraordinary technique at the service of artistry and storytelling.
At first blush, The Sleeping Beauty might be shrugged off as quaint children’s entertainment. In ballet circles, however, it is one of the Big Three, along with The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, comprising the art form’s foundational gold standard and architectural blueprint. Combining Tchaikovsky’s matchless score with choreographer Marius Petipa’s genius for danced storytelling, it remains one of the most performed ballets in the world more than 130 years after its premiere.
Haydée created this production in 1987. The curtain opens on designer Jürgen Rose’s glorious rococo vision of a fairytale court: the wigs of laughing courtiers become bobbing bright spots of powder white in a green pleasure garden straight from a pop-up book. Court dress abounds in every shade of blue: cornflower, sky, periwinkle and a dark shade like the stain of bruised mulberries. The blues soften to pastel-toned opulence as fairies spring onto the scene in glittering head-dresses, their pointe shoes pitter-pattering as they dance towards a baby’s crib. It is Princess Aurora’s christening and they have come with magical gifts.
Foremost is the Lilac Fairy, danced with tranquil radiance and beautiful adage lines by Abigail Willson-Heisel. Then, amid thunder and lightning, arrives the wicked fairy Carabosse – the balletic foremother of Disney’s Maleficent – hellbent on revenge.
Technique takes its rightful place in the service of story: the princess awakens, the lovers unite, the fairytale lives on.
Revamping what was traditionally an older female mime role with little dancing, Haydée dramatically reimagines Carabosse as an explosive male virtuoso part, the fairy’s magical force reflected in the spinning leaps and fiery athleticism of men’s bravura dancing. Carabosse’s costuming is Kabuki-inspired: a face coated in eerily thick white paste, framed by waist-length hair and flowing robes. His billowing cloak can spread to cover the entire stage or wreathe around victims in a suffocating bind. In the role on opening night, Jason Reilly’s physicality devours the stage. Bounding up the palace stairs two at a time, his presence is devious, commanding and dangerously charismatic.
Carabosse is a looming constant throughout, locked in unceasing battle with the Lilac Fairy. Haydée spares Carabosse the usual demise of fairytale villains; instead, he endures, casting a shadow over even the royal wedding finale. Given the production’s 1987 premiere, commentators have long interpreted Haydée’s retelling as influenced by the Cold War, in which the Eastern Bloc was never entirely extinguished but simply contained in a tremulous balance of power.
In contrast, as Princess Aurora, global ballet star Elisa Badenes brings irrepressible delight. Her Aurora dances with the buoyancy and sparkling curiosity of a teenager on the cusp of womanhood. It is one of the most exposed roles in traditional ballet, demanding virtuoso balances and turns and clean classical positioning. Badenes makes the technique look not just easy but a natural overflowing of Aurora’s effervescent temperament.
As her Prince Désiré, Henrik Erikson is a textbook danseur noble, blessed with unflustered aristocratic poise and silky turns. His seamless partnership with Badenes gathers real warmth, building to its fullest dramatic transformation in the Act III grand pas. As the couple laughingly catch each other’s eye before a sequence of supported retirés and plunging fish dives, their off-balance feats register not just as danced steps but as mutual trust and shared delight.
Their Act III wedding also features another Haydée expansion of male dancing: the introduction of Ali Baba to the fairytale character divertissements. Riccardo Ferlito attacks the variation with gravity-defying wonder: vaulting leaps, whipping pirouettes and multiple tours en l’air, finishing in precise cat-like landings. The audience begins cheering even before he has finished.
Haydée has nevertheless maintained that athletic display should not disrupt a ballet’s dramatic world. She inherited this principle as the muse of John Cranko, the choreographer who in the 1970s brought Stuttgart Ballet to international acclaim with his deep understanding of dramatic integrity and narrative storytelling. Each dancer, from Princess Aurora to the courtiers, inhabits a character for whom acting is just as important as the steps, with the most relatable of everyday gestures crowning Petipa’s original choreography. Unlike in other companies, for example, where Aurora’s four suitors simply walk into place for the famous Act I “Rose Adagio”, Stuttgart Ballet turns the movement into a miniature courtship drama, each man edging his rivals aside for Aurora’s attention. Carabosse, even when disguised as a seated background figure, can be glimpsed through the corps de ballet mocking the centre stage dancing with contemptuous mimicry.
The gifts of Stuttgart Ballet matter especially in Australia, where our national company has never quite recovered the dramatic fluency that distinguished its story ballets from the late 1980s, gradual decline becoming increasingly noticeable from the 2010s. Former artistic director Maina Gielgud warned more than a decade ago that although The Australian Ballet was making extraordinary progress with contemporary work, younger dancers lacked confidence in the classics and risked allowing technical polish to obscure dramatic purpose. The result, she cautioned in a prescient foreshadowing of Timothée Chalamet’s recent provocations, would be audience boredom and accusations that ballet was dead or dying.
In recent years, artistic director David Hallberg has admirably expanded the company’s international repertoire and imparted to its dancers something of his cool, elegant virtuosity. Yet the company-wide standard in classical storytelling remains noticeably patchy and undeveloped, with casts often seeming more comfortable with technique over the much rarer – but infinitely more rewarding – ability to inhabit a character and communicate a story arc across an entire evening. Hallberg’s unannounced decision to retire Graeme Murphy’s narrative ballets has also removed a major facet of the company’s distinctly Australian storytelling identity. Whatever one thinks of Hallberg’s preference, the fact remains that no Australian choreographer has filled Murphy’s space in the repertoire, and neither has the company recovered the dramatic capacity demanded by either Murphy’s work or the classics.
This makes The Australian Ballet’s decision to invite Stuttgart Ballet to Melbourne both generous and astute. It offers Australian audiences a rare encounter with the narrative tradition at its highest and most satisfying. Against Stuttgart Ballet, Chalamet’s proposition seems absurd. Instead, technique takes its rightful place in the service of story: the princess awakens, the lovers unite, the fairytale lives on.
The Sleeping Beauty is playing at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, until October 18.