Reviews of ABT/Ratmansky Sleeping Beauty

[Olga]

I do agree with Wendy about the style of the ballet. I, too, miss dance "that extends into space." And that "dance evolves for a reason. It adjusts to how cultures and bodies change" . I, too, question the wisdom of spending so much money on wigs and costumes, when ABT's lower ranked dancers aren't paid enough and there are way too few coaches for the company. So, I think there is lots of good food for thought in the article. Which makes it very interesting .

Wendy genuinely loves all forms of dance and all dancers. She emphatically dislikes (often expressed in her tweets) the kind of gratuitous negativism that informs many of Macauley's articles. For her to criticize a work is unusual. So I take the article as real food for thought about ballet, the privileged classes, etc. I certainly will be thinking about it the next time (probably) I see SB,

Thank you Amour for your calm and reasoned response to Perron's review. I thought Perron raised some of the deepest and most interesting questions about this production of any review I have read.

[California]

In reading this exchange, I'm reminded of Matthew Bourne's comments that the story doesn't make sense, especially the love-at-first-sight in the awakening. I enjoyed the Bourne version of Sleeping Beauty, although I know many on this board didn't, and he didn't resolve all the problems either, at least according to critics at the time. Brian Seibert's review in 2013 is typical:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/arts/dance/matthew-bournes-sleeping-beauty-at-city-center.html?_r=0

I suppose the message is that this SB requires serious suspension of belief so you can focus on the music and dancing. But all those costumes and wigs are a major distraction. And I'm not sure why we need to re-learn how to appreciate the technical virtuosity of the early 20th century. It's fun to watch tapes of Olga Korbut's back "summy" on the uneven parallel bars in 1972 at the Olympics, but they're of historic interest only at this point, now that such moves are standard for today's gymnasts. Today it's impossible to get as excited as those commentators were back then. Technique has moved on in ballet, too, a century later. It's interesting to see what the standard was back then, but hard to get excited about it.

[Helene]

I'm very excited by it, particular the demands for petite allegro, which elude many of today's dancers, and reminds me of Joyce Di Donato's comments to a student at a recent Carnegie Hall master class in which she told the singer she could get away with her runs, because currently, her approach was passable, but that if she wanted to do them properly, she needed to do specific exercises daily. The standards for singing Handel and later bel canto operas were much higher in certain technical aspects in their day than in the mid- and late-20th century (to current day) revival periods, just like they are in ballet or in figure skating or gymnastics, where many of the transitions and continuous effects were shunted aside to make preparations for bigger technical elements.

As far as the "love at first sight" awakening not making sense, I don't hear anyone complaining about Romeo and Juliet falling in love at first sight, even though he showed up to pursue someone else. When we last saw Aurora, she was about to choose between four suitors at her coming out party, something that alone would have signified great change, until interrupted by what she considered a death experience, emotions at high pitch. Just because she wears a tutu and doesn't have a tragic end doesn't mean she isn't a character full of young emotions, unless the dancer performs it as a technical display, like many singers treat Handel arias while ignoring the text.

[Drew]

Korbut still looks a heck of a lot more charming and humane than today's gymnasts.

(Not drawing an exact analogy with ballet. I like many of today's dancers; today's gymnasts on the other hand...)

[vagansmom]

nice to hear that about Perron, Amour. Thank you.

[mimsyb]

In reading this exchange, I'm reminded of Matthew Bourne's comments that the story doesn't make sense, especially the love-at-first-sight in the awakening. I enjoyed the Bourne version of Sleeping Beauty, although I know many on this board didn't, and he didn't resolve all the problems either, at least according to critics at the time. Brian Seibert's review in 2013 is typical:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/arts/dance/matthew-bournes-sleeping-beauty-at-city-center.html?_r=0

I suppose the message is that this SB requires serious suspension of belief so you can focus on the music and dancing. But all those costumes and wigs are a major distraction. And I'm not sure why we need to re-learn how to appreciate the technical virtuosity of the early 20th century. It's fun to watch tapes of Olga Korbut's back "summy" on the uneven parallel bars in 1972 at the Olympics, but they're of historic interest only at this point, now that such moves are standard for today's gymnasts. Today it's impossible to get as excited as those commentators were back then. Technique has moved on in ballet, too, a century later. It's interesting to see what the standard was back then, but hard to get excited about it.

I also happened to like the Mathew Bourne "Sleeping Beauty". Yes, while failing to also address or solve some of the problems, I found it to be an amazing take on the entire ballet and his use of the score was also well done. One of the best Garland Waltzs ever. And his "Rose Adagio" was stellar!

[sandik]

And I want it all -- Bourne's version, the post WWII newly-minted Royal Ballet's version, Ratmansky's recisions in the current ABT version, the Ronald Hynd version I see most often at Pacific Northwest Ballet -- I don't want to lose track of any of these developments.

[Quiggin]

I haven't seen this production but am excited about this approach – like listening to Bach after too much Beethoven – all the textures and harmonics rather than the drive to heroism and overcoming adversity, etc. More "in-between things" as Alexei Ratmansky tells Joan Acocella:

As he told me, however, accuracy was not his primary concern. What he wanted above all was just to look this famous old ballet in the face, insofar as he could. “I was interested to find out: What is Petipa? What is ‘Sleeping Beauty’?” ...

The main thing that they found there, Ratmansky says, was much more complication than we see in modern productions of “Beauty”—more subtlety, more gradation, more in-between things, more of what visual-arts people call modelling.

“Today,” Ratmansky says, “we stretch the knee so hard, it stiffens the spine.” The “Beauty” notation rarely shows a fully stretched knee. Likewise, on today’s ballet stages, the foot is forcefully pointed most of the time, whereas Petipa varied the tension: half-point, quarter-point. “The technique of turns is also different. Petipa’s turns are faster, and with more degrees of bending of the knee.” Sometimes the “working leg” (the leg that’s in the air) might point its toes directly at the knee of the “supporting leg,” as is the rule today. But at other times the situation might be looser, with the toes aimed at the supporting leg’s mid-calf or ankle.

(registration needed for this):

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ratmanskys-beauty-wakes-up

[vipa]

I haven't seen this production but am excited about this approach – like listening to Bach after too much Beethoven – all the textures and harmonics rather than the drive to heroism and overcoming adversity, etc. More "in between things" as Alexei Ratmansky tells Joan Acocela:

(registration needed for this):

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ratmanskys-beauty-wakes-up

This is all very interesting but I believe that we have to keep in mind that Petipa had dancers that were very different from today's dancers. Also, if you are talking about different degrees of bending the knee in turns we only have to look at Balanchine. His choreography sometimes has a dancer turn with a foot low, a foot in back etc. It's not as if this vocabulary has been lost.

To me this SB is a period piece which I'm glad I saw but won't spend money on again.

[nijinsky1979]

Hello, everyone! I found this thread tonight and was interested to read the passages from Doris Humphrey's book. But I have to correct a few things. (1) Giselle actually premiered in 1841, not 1851 — a minor error, for sure, but it immediately calls Doris Humphrey's credibility into question. When you're talking about such a famous ballet, as with any famous work of art, you had better get your facts straight before you start hurling criticism. (2) She really glosses over "hundreds of years" of ballet history. She writes as if ballet remained the same for centuries, and that is simply not true. Ballets were not so formulaic for hundreds of years: their separation from operas was an innovation; the Romantic ballet blanc was an innovation; pointe shoes were an innovation; gymnastic leaps and turns were innovations. The primacy of male ballet dancing also waxed and waned over the years. (3) Moreover, the passage from the book also seems to ignore that classical ballet in Russia was stunted because the Imperial Theaters were such mammoth bureaucratic nightmares. Diaghilev, of course, came to the rescue. Does Ms. Humphrey say any of that in her book?

[sandik]

While The Art of Making Dances was published in 1958, Doris Humphrey developed most of the material in it beginning in the 1920s, when she first began working with Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn.  The ballet that she was familiar with at that time was limited in the extreme, and as she began to refine her approach to choreography she found very little of substance in the theater dance of her time.  She and her colleagues were devoted to the creation of an American dance form -- they thought of ballet, whether good or bad, as a European art, as did many dance writers of that time.  The Art of Making Dances is not a dance history text, but a treatise on choreography.

 

Interestingly, both the early moderns and the Fokine generation were disparaging of late classical ballet and its borrowing from other cultures -- what today we often call cultural appropriation.

Edited July 2, 2017 by sandik