The Sleeping Beauty: English National Ballet merges high drama and cool classicism with ease

Emma Byrne7 June 2018

English National Ballet may have won rave reviews for its bold, modern programming, but it’s in the tutus and tiaras where the real challenge lies.

That’s because the cornerstone of any classical company remains Petipa’s 19th-century spectacles, with their lavish sets, bonkers plotlines and starry divertissement. Merging high drama and cool classicism is no mean feat — ENB’s The Sleeping Beauty makes it look easy.

Kenneth MacMillan was fascinated by the dark and disturbing, yet his Beauty, created for ABT in 1987, is all airiness and light. Much of that has to do with Nicholas Georgiadis’s stunning costumes; the rest with the choreography, which has been kept as close as possible to Petipa’s original vision.

This is a ballet full of opportunities for soloists to shine (power duo Daniel McCormick and Rina Kanehara were particularly fine in Act III’s Bluebird pas de deux).

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But the opening night belonged to the luminous Alina Cojocaru, the run’s first Aurora.

Watching her breeze her way through the Rose Adagio — the most terrifying of all ballet’s technical challenges — must be worth the price of admission alone.

Until June 16

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