Staging The Sleeping Beauty at PNB

Since its creation in 1890 in St. Petersburg, Russia, The Sleeping Beauty has been a pillar of the classical ballet repertory. Its score by Tchaikovsky and choreography by Marius Petipa represent one of the greatest collaborative achievements in music and dance in the 19th century. Pacific Northwest Ballet’s production of The Sleeping Beauty is also the product of collaboration: a team of artists assembled and led by Artistic Director Peter Boal has come together to create a new version of the enduring classic.

Vision and Collaboration

Peter’s vision for The Sleeping Beauty sees the ballet set in a timeless fantasy world inspired by the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest and Northwest Coast art. First-time scenic designer Preston Singletary, working with associate scenic designer Charlene Hall, has combined his expertise as a glass artist with elements of his Tlingit cultural heritage to create the signature scenic element of the production, the Eagle Staircase. Preston also suggested the association between two characters found in Tlingit stories—Eagle, a symbol of power, and Raven, a shapeshifting, troublemaking trickster—and The Sleeping Beauty’s Lilac Fairy and Carabosse, who represent the yin and yang of fairy godmotherhood. The ballet’s monarchs, originally “King Florestan XIV” (a nod to the French King Louis XIV) and “The Queen,” have been renamed by Peter as King and Queen Papillon, both a play on the term “monarch” (“papillon” means “butterfly” in French) and a contribution to the production’s diverse menagerie of nature-inspired characters.

A costume design of Queen Papillon by Paul Tazewell

At its premiere, The Sleeping Beauty was described as a ballet-féerie, a genre that combined a fantasy plot with lavish production elements, visual effects, and large casts. Characters in the ballet are often introduced in the context of processions, providing the perfect opportunity to display costumes and props. The 1890 Sleeping Beauty featured such a large cast in elaborate costumes that one reviewer wrote, “The new ballet might justly be called The Sleeping Beauty, or the Triumph of the Art of Sewing!” The 100+ artists who have built the costumes for PNB’s version can surely attest to that subtitle.

In the spirit of The Sleeping Beauty’s fantasy setting, costume designer Paul Tazewell has drawn on multiple inspirations for the ballets 250+ costumes. Most significantly, he has generously incorporated formlines—flowing patterns of lines that are a fundamental design element of Northwest Coast art and a prominent feature of Preston’s glass art—into nearly every costume design. Some of the formlines have been hand-drawn by Preston, while others are more abstract representations. The scenery and costumes are augmented by the projected animation and still images designed by Wendall K. Harrington, and Reed Nakayama’s lighting design serves not only to enhance the dancing but to guide the audience as they follow the story. Puppetry designer Basil Twist has added a further dimension to The Sleeping Beauty with his unique designs for Carabosse’s nest of mice and the Ogre in pursuit of Hop o’ My Thumb and his brothers.

Staging the Dances, Mime, and Action

To stage the dances, we’ve used choreographic notes made by Nikolai Sergeyev, one of Petipa’s rehearsal directors at the Imperial Ballet, during 1903–1906. Sergeyev’s notes document Petipa’s choreography, mime, and stage action and over the years have contributed to the rich history and longevity of The Sleeping Beauty. They were used by Sergeyev to restage The Sleeping Beauty for the Imperial Ballet at St. Petersburg’s fabled Mariinsky Theatre during the years following Petipa’s death, for the historic 1921 Ballets Russes production in London, and for the 1939 Royal Ballet (then called Vic-Wells Ballet) production that re-opened Covent Garden after World War II in 1946. (The Royal Ballet production was also the basis for Ronald Hynd’s staging of The Sleeping Beauty danced by PNB during the years 2001–2019.)

Leta Biasucci and Lucien Postlewaite rehearse The Sleeping Beauty, photo © Lindsay Thomas.

Speed, Travel, and Three-Dimensional Orientation

The choreographic notes allow us to bypass decades of changes made to The Sleeping Beauty and bring us closer to what Petipa created. We’ve restored not only steps but also the speed and musicality that more faithfully represent Tchaikovsky’s score. Our goal has been to remain faithful to Petipa’s choreography while allowing the dancers to move in ways that feel natural to them today. In addition to speed, both travel and a balanced geometrical use of stage space are hallmarks of Petipa’s choreography. Multiple dance steps are combined into flowing phrases that are performed along diagonal paths. Traveling on the diagonal, as opposed to moving flatly from side to side and directly facing the audience, was the preferred orientation of a dancer’s body because this was believed to offer the most advantageous view of a dancer moving three-dimensionally through space. Dancing steps first on one diagonal and then the other, with the dancer performing a mirror repeat of their steps, offers an audience symmetry and visual logic and underscores the rigor of classical ballet.

Doug Fullington in rehearsal with Leah Terada and Jonathan Batista, photo © Lindsay Thomas.

Finding Today in Yesterday

As we worked with both the notes and the ballet’s 1890 libretto, we found elements in the original conception of the story that are a better fit for today’s sensibilities than some of the revisions made to The Sleeping Beauty in the 20th century. For example, Aurora is twenty years old when we first meet her, not sixteen (a change made for the 1921 production). When she is introduced to her four suitors, her father makes clear that her choice of marriage partner is her own. More broadly, we found in the fairytale a story that embodies a range of metaphysical ideas about existence, personhood, destiny, causality, space, time, and the balance of good and evil. Carabosse, as it turns out, isn’t the ultimate evil. Once her curse is mitigated and seen through to its end, balance is restored. She attends the wedding of Aurora and Désiré—why would the court risk not inviting her again? Aurora and Désiré, each a model of exemplary character, have their own destinies: Aurora’s destiny is to welcome a new era by bringing her family and her kingdom forward one hundred years in time, thus intersecting with Désiré’s coming of age and allowing him to find purpose as the awakener and ultimately the partner of the Sleeping Beauty.

Gender Roles

Our exploration of gender roles was based on both historic and contemporary casting decisions. Peter decided one of Aurora’s suitors would be a female-identifying role, so I brought to his attention that two of the fairies in the ballet’s prologue were originally partnered by female pages, a feature made clear in the choreographic notation. The first production also featured travesty roles—characters portrayed by artists of the opposite gender. These included the role of the fairy Carabosse—a female character first portrayed by Enrico Cecchetti—and the pages who play violins in the ballet’s second scene—male roles portrayed by senior female students of the Imperial Ballet school. In PNB’s production, Lilac Fairy pages—female-presenting roles—partner the fairies, Carabosse is performed by a variety of artists, and the violin pages are male-presenting roles performed by Company corps de ballet. Finally, acknowledging that in the 19th century ballet steps were less gendered than they became in the 20th century (when women increasingly focused on pointe work and men on acrobatic bravura steps), we changed the original line-up of four female jewel fairies (Gold, Silver, Diamond, and Sapphires) to include two female-presenting roles, with dancers performing on pointe (Diamond and Sapphire), and two male-presenting roles (Gold and Silver).

Jonathan Porretta rehearses the role of Carabosse with Zsilas Michael Hughes and Dylan Wald, photo © Lindsay Thomas.

Naturalness

Naturalness, an important feature of 19th-century story ballets, is another concept we explored—in particular, natural gestures, movement, and acting onstage, both in mime scenes and scenes that combine dance and acting (a genre sometimes called pas d’action). Committing to naturalness can be tricky because the temptation exists for modern-day stagers to erase moments of naturalness suggested in the source material by over-staging the scene, adding choreography, or simply asking dancers to stand in ballet-based poses.

The role of Aurora is an unusual one in the canon of 19th-century ballet because it is expressed almost solely through dance instead of the usual combination of dance and mime. Finding opportunities for naturalness in the context of Aurora’s dances is therefore essential for her character development and for communicating relatability and accessibility to an audience. The heart of this naturalness is the loving relationship Aurora has with her mother and father, the Queen and King. In the ballet’s second act, her naturalness and warmth imbue her growing romantic relationship with Prince Désiré during the vision scene and reach their culmination during the wedding pas de deux, when she publicly professes her love for him.

Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan and Christopher D’Ariano rehearse The Sleeping Beauty, photo © Lindsay Thomas.

More broadly and in terms of the stage space, naturalness in 19th-century story ballets often increases outward from the center stage to the wings. For example, a complex dance like the Rose Adagio, performed by Aurora at the center of the stage, involves a frame of dance partners (her four suitors) whose movements are at times choreographed (when they partner Aurora) and at other times natural (when they ask Aurora’s attendants to give them roses). A second frame of non-dancing onlookers (the King and Queen, courtiers, villagers who earlier performed the Garland Dance), whose movements include natural poses and gestures, surrounds Aurora and her suitors.

Idealism and Aspiration

Rather than an ordinary human or fantastical creature, Aurora represents idealism and aspiration. Her outer beauty surely represents her inner goodness. In a stroke of theatrical genius, Petipa structured each scene of the ballet around a centerpiece dance that arrives at a climax in which Aurora, placed at centerstage, is glorified—first as an infant blessed by her godmothers at her christening in Scene 1, then as an idealized young person full of joy and confidence during the Rose Adagio in Scene 2, as a goddess heralding the dawn of a new age during Désiré’s vision in Scene 3, and finally as a consummate being who has fulfilled her destiny in Scene 5.

But although Aurora is different from the leads in other heritage ballets, she is the same in an important way. Like Giselle, Swanilda, Paquita, and a host of others, Aurora drives the action and the narrative, overwhelming the stage with energy from her first entrance. Even in her sleep, she actively draws Désiré to her, and later she declares her love for him during their wedding duet. Aurora isn’t a passive heroine, but an active, lively, exhilarating character who we believe can still inspire and uplift us today.

See the world-premiere production of The Sleeping Beauty on stage January 31 – February 9, 2025.

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Bio: Doug Fullington is a dance historian and musicologist who has contributed historically informed dances for ballet companies around the world. In 2024, he staged Star on the Rise, a reimagined version of the ballet classic La Bayadère, with Phil Chan at Indiana University. He is co-author with Marian Smith of Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg (Oxford, 2024), a detailed history of the ballets Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda. Doug has worked for PNB in several capacities since 1995. He founded the Tudor Choir, a professional vocal ensemble, in 1993. dougfullington.com