When nearly 150 students from throughout Peabody Preparatory Dance’s spring classes stage The Sleeping Beauty May 19, the classic ballet is going to look and sound slightly different from the usual tale. Aurora, the princess whose christening is celebrated by fairy godmothers bearing gifts such as beauty and fertility, is now an ordinary village woman being given curiosity, generosity, courage, and wisdom by those women. The social ostracism of Carabosse, the slighted fairy whose curse sends Aurora into a deep slumber, gets developed more. And the charming prince whose kiss eventually wakes Aurora? He’s now an explorer and, well, perhaps the idea of a strange man showing up to kiss an unconscious woman isn’t a plot point or scenario that should be a narrative device, even in fairy tales.
Professional and collegiate ballet, opera, and musical theater companies alter, update, change, and rearrange works all the time, whether that be to streamline running times, accommodate different vocal ranges or instrumentations in ensembles, or simply modernize outdated clichés. What Franki Graham, Director of the Peabody Preparatory Dance Department, is aiming for with the changes she’s introduced to Sleeping Beauty is to thread a more nuanced needle to maintain the ballet traditions of a beloved major work while bringing the storyline and movement into the 21st century. “Our goal is to make the ballet relevant to the lives of our students and audience members,” Graham says. “We are using the classical art form and storytelling to discuss themes that are pertinent to the times we live in.”
Like so many of the now canonical works of ballet and opera, composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa created Sleeping Beauty for the lavish late 19th-century royal theater of Imperial Russia and its posh audiences. Ballet works especially from this era—Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Giselle, La Bayadère, Coppélia, Don Quixote, La Sylphide—remain audience favorites that artists realized needed to be reimagined even before the pandemic, whose disruptions accelerated and amplified the economic challenges the performing arts already faced.
These necessary creative reimaginings of repertoire at the professional level cascade into different challenges at the training level: how to prepare young artists for the contemporary creative industry while providing the traditional basics? Peabody Magazine caught up with Graham to talk about balancing pedagogy and pragmatism in updating Sleeping Beauty for the Preparatory.
Every year the Preparatory stages a major ballet—Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There’s a pedagogical logic behind such a cycle, correct? Over the course of training from early childhood to pre-college, dancers have the chance to perform in a range of roles?
Within each of these ballets, we fit certain scenes and roles to specific levels of dancer in our program. This allows us to showcase and celebrate all of our dancers at whatever level they may be, but it also means that individual dancers graduate into new roles that they’ve seen performed in previous years. Many of the advanced students who have lead roles in this year’s performance will talk about when they performed in the “Red Riding Hood” scene when they were younger, for example. It also means that our young students can look forward to more challenging roles each cycle. On a practical level, having a limited number of shows cuts down on our storage needs for costumes and sets year to year, but the sense of tradition and camaraderie that it builds between dancers across our program is definitely the best motivation for this structure.
Can you talk a bit about the narrative and musical changes you’ve made to Sleeping Beauty, and how those changes will impact the production?
The changes we’re making fall into two broad categories: movement changes and reinterpreting the plot. For movement, when Marius Petipa choreographed the original staging of Sleeping Beauty in 1890, costumes were bigger, pointe shoes were less sturdy, and audiences appreciated repetition of movement themes throughout the work. For a modern staging, the movement has to change to some degree to appeal to modern ballet aesthetics and the ability to do more on pointe.
We are breaking from tradition more strongly by including contemporary movement vocabulary alongside ballet in our production. Although Petipa and Tchaikovsky would probably not approve, the Preparatory Dance program trains students in ballet and contemporary dance, and we believe that contemporary movement provides opportunities to tell the story more fully without needing to stay within the confines of classical ballet movement vocabulary.
We’ve also rearranged and reemphasized parts of the story to develop more depth in the characters and create a more nuanced plot. For example, in the original story, the Prince is the good guy simply because he is royal—a natural assumption for the aristocratic audiences of the original production—and Carabosse is inherently evil without any clear reason or motivation. By resituating these characters and giving them more of a back story, audiences become invested in the journey and outcome.
Of course, the classical music wasn’t intended for these plot updates, so we have rearranged the Tchaikovsky score to serve what we need it to, making creative decisions where necessary. It might not have been what the composer originally intended, but an important feature of the update was keeping almost all the music from the traditional ballet, which we have.
These changes aren’t simply for contemporary audience sensibilities; you’re making changes that, hopefully, capture young people’s imaginations today.
The Sleeping Beauty reflected the values of the 1890s and was based on a version of the fairy tale published in France in 1697. Our reinterpretation of this work should reflect our values now. In the 17th century, grace and beauty were considered some of the most important virtues a woman could possess, so it made sense to audiences at that time that these would be the gifts a Fairy Godmother would give Aurora. But in that era, women were also excluded from most aspects of public life and expected to be meekly obedient to the men in their lives.
A modern retelling of this story shouldn’t reproduce the prejudiced ideas of the past. In our version, Aurora is given gifts that are relevant to our students and to modern audiences—courage, generosity, curiosity, and compassion enable Aurora to recognize that Carabosse is not evil, she’s just misunderstood and isolated from her community, which causes her to lash out. Every work of art is a product of its time, and our reinterpretation of Sleeping Beauty should reflect the experiences and values we hold now. That is ultimately what will resonate with our students and audience.
Could you speak specifically to one of the changes made and discuss how that plays out onstage?
In Sleeping Beauty the “Rose Adagio” is iconic. In the traditional version, this scene features Aurora’s many suitors offering her roses to gain her favor and is focused on partnering between Aurora and each of the men. Aurora holds an attitude derrière position for a long time, and audience members familiar with the work will be expecting those traditional aspects.
Throughout our creative process, we have tried to honor the traditional version, even as we bring it up to date. In the original, it is assumed that Aurora will get married, because that was what was expected of royal women in those days. In our version, Aurora holds that iconic attitude, and the scene features lots of partnering, but each pas is between Aurora and one of her Fairy Godmothers, and each rose (which symbolize the gifts given to Aurora earlier in the show) are returned to the Godmothers by Aurora to thank them for supporting her throughout her life. The movement will satisfy those viewers looking forward to the “Rose Adagio,” but the changes we’ve made shift the emphasis toward our values today.
Is this updating the first in perhaps a series of subtle tweaks you’re making as a program director? Slight changes in training to show how the Prep is participating in the contemporary dance training discussions going on right now?
There are many ongoing debates in the dance world, particularly in regard to ballet traditions that, although widely accepted in the past, don’t fit with our values as teachers and artists. Things such as rigid gender roles or allowing tights and ballet shoes in tones other than pink that highlight ballet’s racist past. Many organizations throughout the country speak out against these traditions but don’t always follow through in terms of real change and our goal is to follow through. We see ballet as useful but not sacred, and we are more interested in preparing our students to be dynamic artists and openminded changemakers than we are in reproducing the classical canon and perpetuating harmful traditions. So, yes, this is part of a larger shift happening throughout the dance world, and we are hoping to make Peabody Preparatory Dance a leader rather than a follower in that movement.
And while I have invested a lot of myself in this process, it would not be possible without the collaborative effort of the entire department. The whole team is forward thinking and has pitched in to reimagine this classic work. I am very grateful for how much of themselves they have poured into this, and their willingness to push the boundaries and try something new.
Peabody Preparatory Dance presents Sleeping Beauty May 19 in Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall. Free tickets are required and the performance will be livestreamed.