I’m also releasing a video this week, in which I discuss the ways I teach the ballet “The Sleeping Beauty” with children and adults, including musical passages, key variations, and different versions of the story. In it, I talk about how I love to weave in related themes waiting, patience, resilience, awakening and rebirth, winter’s transition into spring, the return of the light, human mortality, gratitude, blessings and curses, virtues, mindfulness…it provides a bridge to many other stories and ideas, both through its narrative (Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast and other fairytale characters attend the wedding in Act III) and through the universal themes it presents.

Balanchine and Mason concede that, “Most of the fairy tales that adults go to the theater to see again and again--Swan Lake, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, the Ring--symbolically enshrine truths about human experience and human behavior to make their pleasures more than incidental," and discuss Charles Perrault's moral of the story, Tchaikovsky's musical interpretation and others. (Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets**  p.553)

They ask, “Does the ‘meaning’ of The Sleeping Beauty not lie simply in its patterns of movement, as does that of, say, Ballet Imperial, Balanchine’s homage to Petipa and Tchaikovsky? While spectacle, pure dance, expressive dance, narrative, and symbolism must mix in any presentation of the work, what importance should be given to any single ingredient? Different productions have provided different answers.”  (Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets** p.554)

For now, we will seek inspiration from all of these ideas and interpretations, and in the future I’ll cover related topics of time, music, how all of this contributes to choreographic inspiration, and more!

Blythe Stephens