Evento

The Sleeping Beauty (Bolshoi Theatre)

Starring Svetlana Zakharova & David Hallberg

Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky's brightest, most festive and joyous work, is also the chief work and masterpiece of St Petersburg choreographer Marius Petipa. The Soviet ballet historian, Yuri Slonimsky, put the significance of the féerie in a nutshell, characterizing it as the "encyclopedia of classical dance". Both the dramatic build-up, which contrives to constantly develop of the dance events in a single, huge span of tension, from the prologue, through four huge adagios and right up to the final apotheosis, and the inexhaustible wealth of inventiveness and diversity and the perfection of the individual dance and step sequences, are seen as exemplary of the St. Petersburg ballet style of the late 19th century.

Grigorovich's Sleeping Beauty is an example of a creative conflict and metamorphosis as reconstruction: "We have breathed new life into the principles of dancing, symphonic dramatization and harked back to Petipa at the same time. Pompous retrospectives were replaced by performances where the human world of the protagonists was the main motivating force of the story line, the focus upon which the choreographer's thoughts and emotions could concentrate."

Running time: 3 hours, 5 minutes including one intermission.

More information on the Bolshoi's website:
http://www.bolshoi.ru/en/performances/442/

Saturday-Sunday, December 3-4 at 10am
Wednesday, December 7 at 7:30pm