Too Stark A 'Beauty'
JACOBS, LAURA A .
OnDance TOO STARK A 'BEAUTY' BY LAURA A. JACOBS American Ballet Theater (ABT) opened this year's spring season at the Met with the second Sleeping Beauty in its history. Artistic Associate...
...Act III is illumined by lanterns hanging against an orgy of chiffon swags...
...The Prologue has gold and ivory putti floating among huge cloth festoons, stormily arrayed and evocative of both rococco artifice and Renaissance robes and folds...
...Although she remains too glib for my taste, she looked at home in the role, displaying a noble line and touching impetuosity...
...Some will miss the cozy interior traditionally associated with Beauty...
...Ross Stretton danced a modest and unusually well-phrased Prince Désir...
...Its subtle geometry connotes freedom, power and empathy with the unknown, making it arguably the most majestic step in ballet...
...In Act I, a diaphanous canopy languishes above Aurora's 16th birthday celebration...
...In deciding to forgo magical stage effects in the Act II panorama and transformation scenes, MacMillan and Georgiadis have sacrificed the ballet's storybook textures for a stark, sometimes provocative grandeur...
...She approaches each, assumes a studious position on pointe, takes his hand, and is promenaded in a complete circle...
...The result is a curious production, one that presents the academics of the dancing against a rather progressive visual design...
...Yet there is virtue in not having our view of the dancing impeded by thrones and obelisks, and distracted by an ambient tumble of riches—as in the version the Sadlers Wells Ballet brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music last winter...
...Artistic Associate Sir Kenneth MacMillan staged the work, and Nicholas Georgiadis—no stranger to Beauty—created the sets and costumes for Marius Petipa's late 19th-century classic...
...The key step is the arabesque, specifically the first arabesque, where the leg lifted behind is symmetric with the opposing arm reaching ahead...
...Taken on pointe, the arabesque becomes an image of incipient flight (and thus is closely associated with Odette in Swan Lake, though her arm positions are more literally birdlike...
...Susan Jaffe was the opening night Aurora...
...Such slights reflect a kind of adult impatience that robs the ballet of its stirring intimacy...
...after the hundred years' sleep, however, they are half-crumbled and overgrown with vines, and look absolutely right...
...Suspension, it seems, is the theme of this Beauty...
...As for MacMillan's staging, it is briskly paced and clear-eyed, but too much so...
...Georgiadis' sets have always tended toward the grandiloquent, and these are no exception...
...Indeed, one might say it is the theme of ballet itself, which begins with the suspension of disbelief and goes on to justify—perhaps the word is sanctify—the attitude physically...
...But his touch here is lighter, more abstract: Heavy brocades give way to gossamer silks and spiderspun metal thread...
...There are further suspensions in the Rose Adagio, one of Petipa's greatest passages, which Aurora dances with her four suitors...
...Tchaikovsky's sublimely apprehensive music scales invisible peaks, circling them like cumulus clouds at the top...
...He omits, for instance, the King's banning of spinning wheels, and later introduces the fateful spindle artlessly...
...The columns at first seem oddly futuristic, perhaps a too conscious effort to strike a note of '80s relevance...
...Georgiadis' tack is a happy one, too, because the ABT corps looks better than it has in years...
...it drops, with a darkening of the stage, as Fairy Carabosse's evil spell comes to pass...
...Then flash, her leg unfurls into an arabesque, a lightning finish...
...Our first glimpse of Aurora at 16, on the precipice of her destiny, finds her posed in an arabesque so open and forward-pulsing that it aptly expresses her blossoming life force, even as it foreshadows the coming 100 years of sleep...
...An arabesque is always in balance—unless, of course, there is a cavalier to lean on...
...I also detect a hint of New York magazine home decor, with its current stress on classicism and "civilized ruin...
...Upon release her arms arc upward in high fifth, and for a tremulous moment a rose window jubilantly frames her head...
...the castle is realized by facades along the wings and horizontally-banded columns grouped in twos and threes along the back, a departure from his usual massive architecture...
...Much of the set actually is suspended above the dancers...
...This Beauty needs more mist, and I don't mean from machines...
...Balance is the expressive image, with Aurora testing the support her suitors give and testing herself as well...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 6
