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<\/a>The Prologue in Alexei Ratmansky’s The Sleeping Beauty<\/em>: the gift-bearing fairies and their six cavaliers. Photo: Gene Schiavone<\/p><\/div>\n American Ballet Theatre is no stranger to The Sleeping Beauty<\/em>. As Ballet Theatre, the new company in town in 1941, the dancers performed Princess <\/em>Aurora, Anton Dolin\u2019s mash-up of elements from the Prologue and Act III of Marius Petipa\u2019s 1890 masterwork. ABT presented its first full-length version in 1976, its second in 1987, and its third in 2007\u2014each staged \u201cafter Petipa\u201d by a different regisseur or choreographer, and all staggering slightly under the weight of virtuosic interpolations and other revisions. Kevin McKenzie, ABT\u2019s artistic director, was responsible for the 2007 version. With generosity and imagination, he has allowed that and the previous versions to give way to a new Sleeping Beauty<\/em> staged by Alexei Ratmansky, and his discernment is rewarded every time this beautiful ballet is performed.<\/p>\n What Ratmansky put on the stage is indeed new\u2014new in the sense of fresh, revitalized, and full of details in the choreography and the staging that we haven\u2019t seen before. But in order to do this, he searched backward toward 1890 via the Stepanov notation of the ballet, which was brought to western Europe by Nicholas Sergeyev when he fled Russia in 1919. Sergeyev had been a fourteen-year-old student in the Imperial Ballet School in 1890 and may well have swelled Sleeping Beauty\u2019s <\/em>enormous cast.<\/p>\n Ratmansky and his wife, Tatiana Ratmansky, taught themselves to read the notation and to make sense of what they found and what they didn\u2019t find (the arm movements were not always notated, for instance) and set to work with the ABT dancers. To their great credit, these performers didn\u2019t behave like members of Russia\u2019s Kirov Ballet when a historically accurate staging was attempted in 1999. Ballerinas reportedly tore off and stamped on the recreated 1890s costumes. They wanted their legs seen. They also wanted every arabesque to point at the moon and would not be dissuaded.<\/p>\n The choreographer did not return to 1890 for all his production ideas. Designer Richard Hudson was inspired by L\u00e9on Bakst\u2019s scenery and costumes for The Sleeping Princess<\/em>, the 1921 reconstruction by Serge Diaghilev\u2019s Ballets Russes, and most of them are grand and gorgeous. Only one aspect of the costumes bothers me. Diaghilev almost lost his shirt on Sleeping Beauty<\/em>, and ABT may have had to do a little cost-cutting. Therefore some of the costumes are made of lighter material. This means that when a female dancer, wearing a full skirt that comes almost to her knees, has to spin rapidly (as Aurora does in the Vision Scene), everything up to her navel is revealed\u2014a sight that conflicts with the relative modesty of the attire in a period when giant hats all but covered gentlemen\u2019s faces. In Act I, when Princess Aurora has pricked her finger and fallen into her hundred-years sleep, and other courtiers are sliding to the floor, curious small pear-shaped projections drift down. What can these be? Gigantic lilac petals in honor of the Lilac Fairy and the six young neophyte fairies that she has stationed to guard the enchanted castle?<\/p>\n Portions of the choreography have changed. For instance, Prince D\u00e9sir\u00e9\u2019s solo in the last act pas de deux is a veritable feast of batterie<\/em>. The various intricate beaten jumps\u00ad\u2014entrechats<\/em>, cabrioles<\/em>, plus gargouillades<\/em> et al\u2014 supersede the usual larger leaps with pauses to prepare. The result is an unbroken stitchery of nimble steps that seem, as the splendid Herman Cornejo performed them in the cast I saw, to be less about showing off for the audience than making a complicated and joyful wedding vow. In the pas de deux\u2019s coda, a handsome repeated phraselet, with an assisted spin by Aurora into a side extension of one leg, has been substituted for the sequence in which she usually takes one spectacular fish dive after another into her savior\u2019s arms; instead, a single such maneuver comes later.<\/p>\n Ratmansky\u2019s research and direction has resulted in a gentler, more lyrical Sleeping Beauty. <\/em>When the dancers step into what are usually arabesques, they bend the knee of their lifted leg slightly, softening and rounding the image. You don\u2019t feel them working to maintain a 180-degree turnout. They endeavor not to lift their legs above 90 degrees. Also notable is the pliancy of their torsos; they bend, arch, and often use their use their upper bodies fluently as they step, say, into a slight turn. Too, some passages that have been puzzling in the past suddenly blossom into meaning. When Aurora in her Act I solo passes along a line of kneeling pages, tilting into an arabesque as she reaches each one and raising one hand to her cheek, you think, \u201cso coy!\u201d But in this Sleeping Beauty<\/em>, the pages are holding violins, so her gesture becomes one of listening to each musician (or to what she imagines they will play), and a sweet detail is added to this sixteenth-birthday party. \u201cJust listen to that!\u201d she seems to be telling us and the assembled onstage guests, before darting off into some more celebratory dancing.<\/p>\n