France Rudolf Nureyev’s The Sleeping Beauty: Paris Opera Ballet, Orchestra of Paris National Opera / Vello Pähn (conductor). Opéra Bastille, Paris, 8.3.2025. (JO’D)
Creatives:
Choreography and Direction – Rudolph Nureyev after Marius Petipa
Music – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Set design – Ezio Frigerio
Costume design – Franca Squarciapino
Lighting design – Vinicio Cheli
Cast:
Princess Aurora – Bleuenn Battistoni
Prince Désiré – Guillaume Diop
King Florestan – Yann Chailloux
The Queen – Sarah Kora Dayanova
The Lilac Fairy – Fanny Gorse
Carabosse – Katherine Higgins
Catalabutte – Osiris Onambele-Ngono
Étoiles, Premières danseuses, Premiers danseurs, Corps de Ballet and Junior Ballet of the Paris National Opera
Revived for the first time in ten years, Rudolf Nureyev’s 1989 The Sleeping Beauty production (‘after Marius Petipa’) for Paris Opera Ballet triumphs over the grand but austere setting of the Opéra Bastille in the Place Bastille. Tchaikovsky’s symphonic score (briskly played under the baton of Vello Pähn) acts on deep emotions even before the curtain goes up. The audience breaks out in spontaneous applause at the climax of the Prologue’s six fairy variations, a physical response to the cumulative power of their sumptuous colour, rich sound and complex, logical movement.
The similarly dressed Lilac Fairy and the ‘bad’ fairy, Carabosse (non-dancing, ‘pantomime’ roles), represent nothing less than the combat between Good and Evil, Life and Death, Order and Chaos. Nureyev has Carabosse sit on the throne at one point to drink wine and throw the empty glass over her shoulder. Her ‘monsters’, male dancers in headdresses, force the protesting fairies to dance with them in a circle. It is particularly insidious, the way that Carabosse will later on use three young women, ‘les trois fileuses’, to reintroduce the banned knitting needles into the kingdom.
Bleuenn Battistoni, as Princess Aurora, combines an adolescent’s excitement at her own youth and the life ahead with a steely precision in her dance. A single movement puts her not just into arabesque, but into what looks like the ne plus ultra of arabesque. Precision is there in the angle of the tilt of her chin. Bleuenn Battistoni is a dancer an audience can watch perform the Rose Adagio almost certain, before it ends, that she will come out of it well.
Guillaume Diop’s long, slim, technically proficient legs carry him through Prince Désiré’s challenging variations and allow him soft landings from leaps and jumps. Only a gesture of the arms, in one of the Act II variations, which in other productions of The Sleeping Beauty is given to Princess Aurora, but which Nureyev gives to the male dancer, lacked a necessary lyricism. What should have been a drawing out of some thoughtful, even mournful, quality in the music, first by one arm, then by the other, was not quite that.
The Sleeping Beauty represented, for Rudolf Nureyev, the ‘apogee’ of classical ballet. Yet the story of its central couple, in his production, seems to end in Act II. After an opening Sarabande (in costumes of yellow, orange and pink) and Polonaise, Act III sees them share the stage not only with Princess Florine and the Bluebird (Marine Ganio and Antoine Kirscher) and Puss-In-Boots and The White Cat (Éléonore Guérineau and Samuel Bray), but also with a pas de cinq of Precious Stones (Célia Drouy, Seohoo Yun, Camille Bon, Clara Mousseigne, in a tutu of silver, and Andrea Sarri, in a coat of gold).
The ballet ends not with a sense of order restored and dynastic duties fulfilled (and also with the feeling that Prince Désiré has got himself stuck in a fairy tale one hundred years before his proper time), but with he and Princess Aurora as a couple among other couples that the choreography and performances have endowed, in an embarras de richesses, with equal interest and charm.
John O’Dwyer