Thursday, December 22, 2022

Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty at Sadler's Wells

After missing a year due to ill health in the family, we relished this opportunity to return to Sadler's Wells this year to see Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty.

Bourne's dancers are wonderful; sometimes there are shortcomings in the narratives of the ballets themselves, but his success rate is so high it's always worth a punt.

It's always a bit disappointing when there's no live orchestra, and the recorded music was a bit loud at the beginning and a bit muffled in a later section, but that all paled into insignificance one the ballet started. The star of the earliest part was the puppet baby, a hilarious scamp that climbed the gold drapes and ran rings around the courtiers. Later in this section, we witnessed some fabulous dancing from the fairies, or vampires perhaps, who performed little cameos that demonstrated their gymnastic flexibility and poise. Then two creepy dancers with obscured facial features, males and female, joined the crew, prophetic of the darker turn that the story was to take later on. But first we were introduced to the suitor, the gardener, and his crush on the young princess. 

At her coming-of-age party, she flirted outrageously with all the men, including the son of the Bad Fairy who had cursed her at birth. In drag, her reappearance as her own son was one of many sly little jokes in the ballet.

The thread all the way through was the heroine, Princess Aurora. Ashley Shaw's dancing was fresh, joyous and incredibly supple. I've read a couple of reviews of this version of the ballet, a really positive one in the Guardian, and a really negative one in The Spectator. I have to say that the guy from the Spectator must have been at an entirely different ballet. He criticised the 'jerky' (I think) movements of the dancers, where they are actually the most fluid troupe of dancers I've ever seen. Ashley Shaw was incredible, seeming to float weightlessly not only when dancing but also in contact with the floor of the stage, when she rose and fell from the challenging positions that the choreography demanded. I can say that quite honestly, this applied to all of the dancers. She was by far the most accomplished, full of infectious joy, but saying that puts her into stellar orbit. It's one of the features of all of Bourne's ballets that the dancers appear to be completely weightless. They must rehearse endlessly to do this; I've become an armchair critic of dancer interactions after becoming overly fond of the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing. There's a lot of charming clumsiness on that show. In contrast, to see the way the groups of dancers flowed and ebbed in this ballet was akin to someone blowing a pile of feathers and them floating gently in the air before settling quietly on the ground. I looked at their legs and feet: often black-clad, they were like spider legs, appearing to move slowly even when they were moving very swiftly.

And there was a vampire too, imparting eternal life on the hapless suitor outside the padlocked palace gates as he searched for the sleeping princess. The Bad Fairy's son was patrolling his hellish nightclub preparing to marry the reluctant princess when a last-minute rescue ensued, ending in a saucy bed scene that resulted in a vampire puppet baby. Awww! 

What an entertaining night, not just in terms of Bourne's gothic revision of the story, but also in presenting inspiring dancing which can only be described as utterly lovely. 

A cathartic performance, for sure.

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