A dança no You Tube III: Sleeping Beauty, de Mats Ek

Sleeping Beauty (1996)
Coreografia de Mats Ek para o Hamburg Ballet
Estreia: 02 de Julho 1996

«[...] 'A fairy tale is like a pretty little cottage, but,' he warns, 'there's a sign on the door saying 'Mined area!' Ek may look like a solid intellectual, but his ballets are often deviantly emotional representations of the human heart, and none more so than his rewrites of the classics. [...] Ek's most recent update is Sleeping Beauty (1996) in which Princess Aurora becomes a young woman reacting against her overprivileged upbringing. Her life is threatened not by black magic but by the drugs dealt her by the malign Carabosse. Even when Aurora is rescued from class A addiction, she too has to learn that there are no happy endings except those that we make for ourselves. [...]

His own style of choreography is a complex fusion of classical, modern and folk, but its blunt, even gawky physicality eschews all the graceful mannerisms of ballet. Certainly in his classical rewrites nothing remains of the original other than the basic story and score. Yet this is not because Ek scorns the classics; rather it's a measure of how he reveres them. He has repeatedly argued that works such as Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty should either be staged in a totally new way, or else presented with strict regard for their integrity.

In fact, directors who tinker with the classics often court more controversy than artists like Ek who redraw them from scratch, simply because it's so difficult to get a new production right. If a director wants to slant a scene or a character differently, he or she has to remain within the limits of what the music is saying as well as keep reasonable faith with the original choreography. If new designs are commissioned, the sets and costumes must not only make sense of the story but also respect the dancers. [...] In any case ballet, as a live art form, has to be made fresh for each generation and all directors perform their own juggling acts between tradition and innovation when they bring a classic to the stage.

Whatever their personal take on the work may be, it will also add to the sum of performances which make up that ballet's history. And this is where radical rewrites such as Ek's are as important to ballet tradition as they are to modern theatre. For even though Ek's Giselle and Sleeping Beauty barely resemble their originals, they still send us back to traditional stagings with a new curiosity. His images add to the resonance of the ballets; his ideas stalk their characters and plots. For anyone who has watched Ek's modern-day fairy tales, the classics can never look quite the same again.

in Sleeping Beauty is a junkie publicado no jornal The Guardian a 23 Agosto 1999. Edição da responsabilidade do blog.

Outros excertos do espectáculo aqui, aqui, aqui e aqui. Excertos de outros espectáculos de Mats Ek e do Cullberg Ballet aqui. Ler aqui texto sobre este e outros trabalhos de Mats Ek, por Jann Parry. Sobre a peça foi editado um livro da autoria de Vanessa de Ligniere que pode ser adquirido aqui. O dvd do espectáculo pode ser adquirido aqui. Mais informações sobre o Hamburg Ballet aqui. Ver folha de sala do espectáculo apresentado no Festival de Edimburgo em 1999.