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| CREATIVE OVERHAUL: Claire Robertson as Princess Aurora and Erik Cavallari as the Prince |
Well over a year ago, and not long after they had sent Cinderella off to the ball in a gorgeous pumpkin-shaped balloon, Ashley Page and Antony McDonald fell to talking about surprising ways a girl might prick her finger, what especially stylish era she might be born in and the kind of strange encounters a Prince might have if he were to go down to the woods one day. And that is how Scottish Ballet's new production of Sleeping Beauty started to take shape.
Tonight, at Glasgow's Theatre Royal, Page's full-length ballet will have its world premiere - and audiences will find again that a familiar fairy tale has gained new twists, new depths and, thanks to McDonald's witty designs, a whole new look. Make that a whole New Look for when the sleeping Aurora is kissed back to consciousness, the year is 1946 and fashion is going to women's heads with Schiaperelli hats and gowns turning heads with nipped-in waists and swishy-swirly skirts that fly in the face of austerity.
McDonald's take on this immediate post-war period is also, uncannily, very haute couture of the moment: some of the outfits worn by the guests at Aurora's chi-chi wedding - staged in the plush ambience of a Ritz or Claridge's - look as if they'd just stepped off a Paris catwalk.
Page takes a very evident pleasure in all this. He agrees that the distinctive, edgy and occasionally kitsch image that McDonald feeds into the production helps assert the company's individuality in the market-place, whether it's at home or further afield.
"Oh, sure," he says. "There are productions of Sleeping Beauty everywhere you look. Most of them are very traditional, not just in keeping to the original choreography, but in the way they look. And, actually, in a lot of those productions, you don't really notice the time shifts. They vaguely go from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, but there's no striking difference, no instantly recognisable indicators, to remind the audience that Aurora has been asleep for 100 years. We wanted to have more fun with that time shift.
"So we started off by saying our version would end in 1946. Because that was when Sadler's Wells Ballet reopened the refurbished Covent Garden after the war - dancing Sleeping Beauty. It's a little bit of history about the ballet, and we've actually gone further in tracing that history. The ballet, as audiences usually see it, began life in Russia, so that's where we start, too, but with a more generally European feel. This is a Princess who's born into that large, extended European royal family that you find in 1830. By the time she wakes up, in 1946, she's slept through two world wars and the Russian revolution, so we felt able to move the story to London.
"By then, those European royals have been dispossessed of their kingdoms, they're now emigres living in hotels and selling off their jewellery to pay the bills. Aurora's wedding is a rare opportunity for aunties and uncles and cousins to get together and have a party."
It's also a jolly convenient opportunity for Page to flex some choreographic muscle: his ensembles and divertissement-duets in Act III slyly pick up on the dance styles of the period: a little kick of Lindy Hop here, a bit of tango there and when he incorporates a Fred step', it's not the usual homage to Sir Frederick Ashton, it's a tongue-in-cheek reference to Fred Astaire.
Weeks spent listening over and over to the Tchaikovsky score, then heading into the studio to devise and rehearse new ways of responding to the familiar motifs - Page, remember, frequently danced to this luscious, evocative music when he was with the Royal Ballet in London - resulted in a massive re-working of the "received" choreography for Sleeping Beauty. In a way, this creative overhaul was inevitable: he and McDonald had already rejigged the storyline, drawing inspiration from the Grimm annals of innocent maidens at risk - from beasts, witches, cruel step-relatives and undeserved curses - so as to flesh out the ballet's skeleton plot. "Sleeping Beauty is this great, iconic ballet," says Page. "Everyone comes away feeling that they've seen some incredible showpiece moments but, actually, it doesn't have a lot of drama. We - Antony and myself - thought it was a potentially meaty subject, ripe for investigation. And, of course, it's another of those building blocks for the company. We've done Nutcracker, we've done Cinderella now it's time for the biggie - Sleeping Beauty."
Brainstorming sessions saw Page and McDonald poring over tomes on the underlying psychology of myths, legends and fairy tales - Bruno Bettelheim's theories struck particular chords with them. Page explains: "When Aurora pricks her finger, bleeds and then falls asleep, you could see that as puberty - rather in the way adolescents seem to sleep a lot. It's not, apparently, because they're lazy: it's just the body's way of coping with all the hormonal and development changes that are going on so the child can emerge as an adult. So when the Prince kisses Aurora after she's been asleep for 100 years, she's ready for a sexual awakening. Luckily, we've all evolved so as it doesn't take that long." He laughs, partly because he knows that - at first sight anyway - audiences won't pick up on all the whimsical, historical, allegorical or stylistic references that are twined into this lavishly conceived production.
One thing they won't see, no matter how often they watch this Sleeping Beauty, is the original Rose Adage with its bravura attitudes and balances an Act I test of technique for the ballerina dancing Aurora.
"I have kept some of the original choreography - Aurora's entrance, because I love it and her solos in Act I and Act III - as a nod back to Petipa, to say thank you for giving us this wonderful heritage. But the Rose Adage is completely new, and rather epic because the suitors do a lot more dancing - they're not just there to prop her up and hand her roses. They don't, in fact, give her roses. When we were going through everything, Antony suddenly said, Why give her roses? She could so easily prick her finger there and then.' "All through my time with the Royal Ballet, it never occurred to me that roses could be fatal to her. But the romantic image is still there. In fact, roses are a strong part of Antony's designs - but in subtler ways."
As for those princely suitors who wake up to find that, as Page puts it, "Aurora has been snaffled by some-one else", they also find fairy tale partners who have come out of the wood, which means that those Act III divertissements no longer seem like a cater-pack of ballet bon-bons, but a genuine extension of the happy-ever-after togetherness of the newly-weds. "Audiences have really responded to what we've done, in past years, with both Nutcracker and Cinderella," says Page. "I hope they know us well enough by now, and trust us, to give them a Sleeping Beauty that is unique, special and a different kind of seasonal magic for audiences of all ages."
Sleeping Beauty opens at Glasgow's Theatre Royal tonight.
In step with his dancers
When Nicholas Kok came to the rescue of Scottish Ballet in 2005, it was a baptism of fire: he was flown in at the eleventh hour to conduct the company's performances at the Edinburgh International Festival after the originally-booked conductor pulled out late in the day. As Scottish Ballet's first appearance at the festival for many years, it was a significant event; and it wasn't any old repertoire, but a formidable twentieth-century programme of works by Stravinsky and Webern, a daunting enough musical prospect without the added complications of working with the choreography of George Balanchine. In the event, the production was an acclaimed triumph, for which the company's artistic director, Ashley Page, won a Herald Angel. Kok received one, too, for his role in the success.
The 2005 festival was something of a watershed for Scottish Ballet, a public acknowledgement of its renaissance under the directorship of Page. It was also the start of what has turned out to be a highly fruitful working relationship. Kok has since returned to conduct both of the company's subsequent festival productions, as well as both the winter productions of Page's Cinderella. This month he is back in Glasgow rehearsing the company's Sleeping Beauty, again choreographed by Page.
Looking back at that first festival production, Kok (who had previously conducted a couple of Scottish Ballet's performances of Romeo and Juliet in Belfast some years previously), thinks it was a good thing to be thrown in. "For most people, a programme of Stravinsky and Webern might seem like a nightmare," he says from Portugal, where he is rehearsing Donizetti's comic opera L'Elisir d'Amore, "but not really for me. I've done so much contemporary music that it's the kind of stuff I know best.
"In fact, it's not nearly as frightening a piece as L'Elisir; with Webern, the interpretation is in essence all in the score, whereas a piece like the Donizetti is determined by the kind of singers you have and all kinds of other things. In a way, it was an ideal programme to step into at the last moment," he continues, "because it was very difficult; it felt as if everyone was on my side."
Given his reputation as a contemporary music specialist, Kok perhaps seems an unlikely person to be conducting Tchaikovsky's lush score for Sleeping Beauty. On the contrary, he claims to thrive on the variety. "I've just been in Portugal working on L'Elisir," he says. "Then I'm coming to Glasgow to start work on Sleeping Beauty before popping down to Manchester to work with Psappha a contemporary music group on an extraordinary programme of UK and world premieres, before heading back to Glasgow . That's where Scottish Ballet is wonderful; I can come in for four days of rehearsal, go away for four to do something else and everyone makes it work."
Ballet, Kok recognises, is looked down upon slightly in some musical circles. "It's not considered as important as opera," he says, "which is crazy when you think that some of the greatest orchestral pieces ever written were created for dance. Tchaikovsky's ballet scores, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, to name but a few. Sleeping Beauty is an extraordinary piece; in fact, I'd even go so far as to say it's one of the greatest orchestral works of the nineteenth century. It's also a virtuoso masterclass in orchestration."
Tchaikovsky's ballets are familiar works in the concert hall in their own right. In the theatre, however, the conductor's freedom of interpretation must have an element of constraint governed by the need to fit with the demands of choreographer and dancers.
"The relationship between the conductor's and choreographer's desired tempo is always going to be one of the themes for discussion," says Kok. "To people I've worked closely with, such as Ashley, I've said, I really think this feels strange, a little slow or too fast but, then, the same thing happens working with a soloist.
"I remember doing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Ilya Gringolts, a fantastic violinist. I loved working with him and learned a lot, but I was so taken aback at how slowly he wanted to take the last movement. In that situation, does one say to the soloist, No, I do my Sibelius like this'? I think there are parallels there with working in the theatre."
Kok believes there are more parallels between working with ballet and opera. "In a sense you're trying to accompany, in the same way you would opera. You're trying to breathe with the dancers, trying to feel what they want to do." The problem, he says, one which is also true of opera, is that you make a huge mistake if you think that following equates to accompanying. "Following the soloist doesn't actually mean anything other than that one invariably gets slower and slower."
The major difference between working in opera and with the ballet, however, is the relative time spent rehearsing and performing. "I spent more than a month rehearsing L'Elisir in Portugal for two performances," explains Kok, "whereas I'll conduct something like 20 performances of Sleeping Beauty over the course of the seven- or eight-week tour."
The prospect of so many performances of one piece might sound rather repetitive, but it's a challenge Kok relishes. It's a delicate balance. You have to make the performance sound fresh each time but within the parameters expected by the dancers. What I love about it is the opportunity for development; I can ask, Why did that not work last night and what can I do to improve it?' And then I get the chance to try it again."
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