Ballet of Lights: Sleeping Beauty in a Sparkling Show

Ballet of Lights: Sleeping Beauty in a Sparkling Show tells the fairy tale of a princess cursed at her christening, sent to sleep for a century, and woken only when the spell finally breaks. Its shape is closer to a ceremony than to a drama, and that is deliberate.

Tchaikovsky wrote the score to a detailed plan set out by the choreographer Marius Petipa, and the collaboration produced the nearest thing classical ballet has to symphonic architecture: recurring themes for the fairy who lays the curse and the fairy who softens it, dances built as extended set pieces, and a final act given over almost entirely to a wedding celebration in which fairy-tale characters appear one after another. The source is Perrault's telling of the story.

In performance the work is an endurance test disguised as a pageant. The ballerina in the title role has to sustain a sequence of slow balances, unsupported and in plain view, then return later with an entirely different set of demands. Around her the corps holds long symmetrical patterns that give the ballet its air of formality. What the plot lacks in urgency the dancing supplies in exposure.