The Sleeping Beauty, American Ballet Theatre, New York — review

The Sleeping Beauty has come to stand for so much — the triumph of order and grace over chaos and unseemliness, of past over future, good over evil, and classical ballet over everything — that the prospect of a new production can inspire dread. Either the ballet or the audience is bound to fall short. So Alexei Ratmansky’s revelatory excavation of the 1890 Petipa original proved a big relief.

The burdensome claims drop away before a fairytale-scaled work that is grand without being grandiose, spectacular without being pompous, and altogether delightful. This Beauty transports us not to the heavens but to a specific moment in ballet history that even those of us who thought we knew our 19th-century idiom have never visited. Ratmansky is not the first to return to the notations of the Beauty choreography in its early years but he is the first to apply them with enough consistency and imagination to achieve a singular and unified vision.

At first glance, though, the ballet seems to have shrunk. The dancers do not gobble up space. Their legs do not point skyward. Most of the action takes place above the collarbone or below the knee, where Richard Hudson’s sexily droopy tutus taper off, with the torso left untouched. Bye-bye, sinuous Soviet back. The qualities that normally course through the body have not disappeared, however; they have simply migrated to the feet, which weave back and forth, pump up and down, and graze ankle, calf and shin in myriad miniature patterns.

But it is the upper body that reveals how far Ratmansky has travelled. The arms and head do not waft about as in current practice but are as precisely placed as words in rhyming couplets, and as intelligible. In the Prince’s dream, Aurora’s arms do not merely express yearning; they say, “Come here.” Forget metaphor. Forget abstraction. This dancing has just emerged from the chrysalis of statuary and mime, ecstatic to be alive.

In short, the brilliant, quirky steps and gestures that characterise Sincerity Fairy, Canary Fairy and their ilk now apply to the whole ballet (minus the leisurely scene-setting at each act’s start when milling prevails). The steps describe archetypal, not psychological, states. The dancer’s task is not to interpret the moves — they are entirely on the level — but to harmonise them with the evocative music. That is how the many devoted dancers this weekend — especially the Auroras I saw, Gillian Murphy and Sarah Lane — distinguished themselves. “Just do the steps,” Balanchine liked to say. Petipa turns out to have said it too.

At ABT to June 13, abt.org; at La Scala September 26-October 23. teatroallascala.org