Royal Ballet Hopes Its New Production Will Bring Back the Old Magic
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
BOSTON
It must have been a pleasure, on that February evening in 1946, to watch a ballet in postwar London without nervous glances at the little red light that told audiences an air raid was in progress. Not that, during the raids, the hard-core ballet lovers ever left. If the dancers kept dancing, why should the audience leave?
Not quite a year after the war's end, much of the city was in ruins and ballet must have seemed a strange priority. Men to play princes and cavaliers were scarce. In the Covent Garden opera house, which had been used as a dance hall through the war, there were still signs proscribing anyone from doing the jitterbug (American servicemen were not inclined to obey). And the ballet company chosen to reopen the opera house, known then as the Sadler's Wells Ballet, was still in its infancy.
Yet it managed to dance one of the greatest and most challenging of the classical works, the Tchaikovsky-Petipa "Sleeping Beauty," the story of a princess sent into a long sleep by an evil fairy, then reawakened by the kiss of a prince. Things were still grim in London, but for those who were there that evening, it seemed certain that English cultural life would survive.
Clement Crisp, now the dance critic of the Financial Times of London, was a schoolboy at the time, and he was there for the opening of the new "Sleeping Beauty." It was a production that would, in many ways, transform the Sadler's Wells dancers into the company we know today, the Royal Ballet -- which begins a run of five performances of "Sleeping Beauty" at the Kennedy Center tomorrow evening. Crisp remembers the effect was wondrous, and the audience ecstatic.
"The war was over," he says from London. "We had been bombed for four years, and suddenly there was peace, and no blackout. One of the funny things was that the theater smelled very strongly of mothballs. They had all got out their dinner jackets from storage."
The 1946 production stayed in the repertoire for decades and for many it defined the style and glamour of the company, which received its "Royal" title in 1956. "Sleeping Beauty" went to New York in 1949, with Margot Fonteyn, and the response was rapturous. And the company has tried, over the years since the production was retired in the late 1960s, to recapture its magic.
That hasn't been easy. The two most recent attempts, one by Anthony Dowell that premiered at the Kennedy Center in 1994 ("ugly sets" was the verdict in London), and another by Natalia Makarova unveiled in 2003 ("a limp Soviet knockoff," wrote one observer), failed to live up to expectations. In 1970, shortly after the old production, with its buoyantly colorful sets by Oliver Messel, had been scrapped, the great American dance critic Arlene Croce shredded a new Royal Ballet "Sleeping Beauty" she saw in New York: "All these years asleep and 'Beauty' wakes up bonkers," she wrote in Ballet Review. Curiously, the ballet that made the company's reputation has been a bit of a curse ever since.
"I think one couldn't possibly approach the 'Sleeping Beauty' without a little nervousness and anxiousness," says Monica Mason, the company's director. Sitting in the garishly faux-baroque splendor of Boston's Wang Center, a cavernous theater where her company was performing last week, Mason has a soft, reassuring presence.
"There have been so many productions, and because the productions cost a great deal of money, you don't like to think you're wasting it, and you don't like to waste the dancers' time," she says.
Mason, who has maintained a ballerina's long and lean look into silver-haired maturity, took over as head of the Royal Ballet in 2002, following a brief and stormy tenure by Ross Stretton (he had some radical ideas about change and he was an outsider, and an Australian, no less). Mason has been with the company for decades, and she has declared herself a keeper of tradition, all of which has soothed nerves as the company celebrates its 75th anniversary this season.
"I don't think that I would particularly feel the need for there to be change," she says. Like many inside the company, when she refers to the Royal Ballet's founder, Ninette de Valois, she still reflexively calls her "Madam." When she speaks of larger trends in the ballet world, she adds an aside that she really knows life only inside the Royal Ballet (where she was, among other things, a dazzling Carabosse, the evil fairy who sets the plot of "Sleeping Beauty" in motion).
Mason is clearly a dancer's dance company director. At a rehearsal in the Wang Center, the company exhibited none of the nervousness and edginess characteristic of tyrannically led groups. When the rehearsal pianist launched into the mindlessly upbeat music used in dance classes the world over, the dancers laughed and giggled and talked.
"I always say that one of the things I would love to do if I had a magic wand is to enable every dancer to maximize their talent," Mason says. "They don't have all the time in the world, probably a maximum of 20 years. It is not possible to make everybody happy all the time, but we try to give as many opportunities as possible."
She sounds relieved to have put together a production of "Sleeping Beauty" that is in many ways a return to the company's 1946 success. Many of Messel's original designs have been used, and the company has turned away from the very Russian approach that Makarova created a few years ago, returning to its own style and cadence.
"I think there is a tremendous value in looking back," she says. "Although in European terms we are still a young company, as a classical company, I think there is a huge part to play in the education of your audiences and your dancers -- where the roots were, and what gave us the possibility to be where we are now."
What those roots are is a matter of some debate. When the Sadler's Wells Ballet danced "Sleeping Beauty" in 1946, it was using a reconstruction of the original choreography of Marius Petipa from the late 19th century. That reconstruction arrived in London in the baggage of Nicholas Sergeyev, a Russian dance teacher and ballet master who notated many of the classic ballets seen in St. Petersburg and helped spread them in the West.
"He was reputed to have arrived from Paris with this suitcase brimming over with pieces of paper, containing these treasures," Mason says. "And it was from his notes that de Valois saw these ballets come to life."
So were the dancers who put "Sleeping Beauty" on the stage in 1946 simply borrowing a Russian dance tradition? Not according to Croce, the dance critic. "They thought they were prolonging the afterglow of the Maryinsky twilight," she wrote, referring to the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, where the original Tchaikovsky-Petipa "Sleeping Beauty" premiered. "When in fact they were seeing the dawn of a great new classic for English dancers."
Over the years, the "Englishness" of the Royal Ballet's approach to works such as "Sleeping Beauty" has been a continuing source of debate and fascination. When Makarova, in 2003, tried to put them into a more Russian mold, the company found it vexing.
"I think for people who had worked on other Royal Ballet productions, it was extremely difficult to suddenly try and phrase things in a very different manner," Mason says.
"They were dreadful," says Crisp of the Financial Times. "Makarova wanted to show how it was danced in St. Petersburg. They didn't understand the fullness of the Petersburg style. They didn't understand the 100 years of tradition that lie behind everything Makarova does."
Crisp says he is no fan of the "cozy, prim way" that some English dancers interpret Petipa. But that same style is what endears the Royal Ballet to other critics, and audiences. The big, forceful, athletic approach of the Russians is softened a bit, tempered, says Mason, by a "fluid softness in the upper body."
"The way that we would approach a lot of the classical work is not in a flamboyant, virtuosic way, but a little more restrained, and conservative," she says.
Mason stresses that the new production is not a slavish re-creation of the old one. The 1946 production had evolved over the years, and because Messel did other productions of the work, it wasn't easy to divine his original intent.
"It was impossible to know which design belonged to which production," she says.
Christopher Carr, senior ballet master for the company, says that among the historical evidence they relied on was an old movie, without sound, made by someone in the audience when the company was appearing in New York.
"Just to see it again," he says, sighing. The film captured two of the company's greats, Fonteyn and Michael Somes, moving about among Messel's designs in silence.
But even with all the historical evidence assembled, Mason says she wasn't interested in exact reproduction.
"Again, it was after the war, everything was rationed, and times were very tight," she says. "So there obviously wasn't anything like the opportunity to give [Messel] full advantage of a large company and say, 'Design what you like because the money pot is endless.' "
The money pot isn't endless today, either. Wigs and shoes from the Makarova production were used, an economy that, Mason says, "made me feel it was a little like after the war." But in other places, the production trumps Messel, with new, more vibrantly colored costumes (very controversial among the English critics) and new designs for Act 2. Mason also brought in one of the ballet world's most sought-after young choreographers, Christopher Wheeldon, to re-create the "Garland Dance," which had been done for previous productions by the company's signature choreographers, Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan.
"Do I want to go back to Ashton, and I thought, no," says Mason, about the decision to add Wheeldon's vision to the mix. "Let's go forward. It's very much a production that looks back but also looks forward."
The verdict, in London at least, has been generally positive. A critic for the Observer hailed it as "a traditional and quintessentially English production." Crisp praised Wheeldon's new "Garland Dance" but was in general guarded: "It is all very nice. And very nostalgic," he wrote. "And woolly-minded."
Nostalgia is the key word, and American audiences are probably fortunate to have less of it, in regard to this production, than English ballet lovers. The English have fussed over this ballet, and this production, for 60 years now. Would it hamper the company if it were addicted to the popular, big-production story ballets? Can the company grow if it is constantly looking back to a rose-tinted vision of the past?
Mason is alert to the concerns, the gripes about the costumes, and the constant need to renegotiate the balance between tradition and new work that expands the company's horizons.
"We have a lot to live up to. I know that," she says. But she adds with evident affection: "I think it looks beautiful."