A “Premiere Stream” from the Royal Ballet

This past Friday the Royal Ballet uploaded to YouTube a video of a full-length performance of The Sleeping Beauty performed in the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. No performance date was given; but, in all probability, this was the video archive of a performance that was broadcast live to cinemas around the world in February of 2017. The upload was part of the #OurHouseToYourHouse series, and it will be available for viewing until August 7. The background material (including casting) on the YouTube Web page is relatively sparse; but a separate Web page has been created with more detailed information about the production, as well as a “trailer” video.

By way of disclaimer, I have to “come clean” with my own opinion that, when compared with the other ballets set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty provides the weakest narrative, perhaps because it involves the most familiar story. Thus, while practically everyone watching this video already knows the story (in some version or another), the choreographic treatment of the narrative has a tendency to come across as at least a little bit clunky. My personal conjecture as that there are too many details in the narrative, which lead to extended mimed passages, whose decoding can be a bit brain-twisting. Furthermore, all those details tend to slow down the pace of the narration, which is less of a problem when you are reading a book than it is when you are watching a performance on the stage.

The narrative is structured as a Prologue (the baptism of the Princess Aurora and the curse of Carabosse) and three acts:

1. Princess Aurora, her four fiancées, and the sleeping curse
2. Prince Désiré discovers Aurora and breaks the spell
3. Aurora’s wedding

In the original choreography by Marius Petipa, both the Prologue and each of the acts has an extended divertissement, which interrupts the plot with a series of highly inventive dance episodes. The staging for the video was produced by Monica Mason and Christopher Newton, drawing primarily on choreography by Ninette de Valois and Nicholas Sergeyev but with additional material created by Frederick Ashton, Anthony Dowell, and Christopher Wheeldon. In the midst of all of those cooks, the divertissement for the second act was elided; and the Wikipedia page for the ballet suggests that those cuts go all the way back to Petipa.

Nevertheless, Sleeping Beauty is a ballet in which the dancers tend to take priority over the narrative. One might thus approach it as a series of highly engaging episodes of abstract ballet with unwelcome interruptions to get back to the plot. As a result those more interested in high-quality dancing technique may find themselves free to doze off during the storytelling for the sake of more attentive appreciation of the choreography behind those divertissements. Sadly, the list of performers on that aforementioned Web page does not adequately account for which dancers are featured in each of those divertissements.

The “fish dive” featured in the pas de deux of Princess Aurora and Prince Florimund (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Personally, I do not mind that elision. These days I find myself primarily interested in the choreography; and I seldom “play favorites” when it comes to who gives the best account of that choreography. Still, during the final act, I could not resist being drawn into both of the major pas de deux offerings. The first of these featured Matthew Ball as the bluebird and Yasmine Naghdi as the Princess Florine, and both of them brought a stunning other-worldliness to their pas de deux. They were then complemented by Fumi Kaneko as the Princess Aurora and Federico Bonelli as Prince Florimund, whose dancing was so absorbing that one barely noticed how minimal the thematic material was.