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The Sleeping Beauty Australian Ballet Artistic Director: David McAllister Festival Centre. Tues 4 Oct. Season closed  There's
an unsubstantiated story doing the rounds of the Adelaide media about
the couple at the Saturday night performance of Australian Ballet's
'The Sleeping Beauty' who were so bored they spent the Third Act text
messaging each other on their mobile phones. If it's true I'd like
to think they required surgical intervention to remove the offending
items. Clearly, they were not in the audience on the night I saw 'The
Sleeping Beauty', where the audience one and all were transfixed by
what they witnessed. This is the best performance I've seen the Australian
Ballet give - period - and by now I've seen a few. Score the same
for a smaller version of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra who inhabited
what seemed a vastly deepened orchestra pit, and even with the benefit
of being out of sight (out of mind) dropped nary a note all night.
They were sublime under the baton of Arvo Volmer. Back to the action: there's not much of a story to the three acts of 'The Sleeping Beauty', Princess Aurora is chosen by the Lilac Queen to be the herald of spring, whereupon Carabosse, the evil queen of winter casts a spell on her. When Aurora is sixteen she greets her suitors and is poisoned (rose thorns!!) by Carabosse, falling into a deep sleep for 100 years. The princes Florimund and Floristan battle the evil queen and awaken the sleeping princess (a kiss on the cheek releases the spell) and Aurora falls in love with Florimund. It was all quite magnificent when bathed in John Rayment's sublime lighting design. The money lavished by set and costume designer Kristian Fredriksen made the stage a sumptuous feast of mostly Byzantine appeal, and it all worked well with the ensemble action, although the winter trees (scuttling around the stage) seemed a little odd. Likewise the cats in the scenes at court. Allied with Tchaikovsky's musical score which seemed so portentiously appropriate for such a host and you had a marvellous event. In any event, the performances were uniformly superb: Lucinda Dunn as Aurora, Damien Welch as Florimund, Lynette Wills as the Lilac Fairy and the sublime Danielle Rowe as Carabosse. It seems the white clad hordes of winter were the best received of the cast, their attire being subtle (white with darkened eye makeup) and gorgeously effective. It's worth noting this was the first occasion for a long time that Adelaide has played host to an AB performance which featured all the company's principal dancers onstage together - and it showed in the excellence and overall appeal. 'The Sleeping Beauty' was simply wonderful.  |
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