Dance
Sleeping Beauty (Cullberg Ballet, Edinburgh Playhouse)
Time for a change
Giannandrea Poesio
To be the son of Birgitt Cullberg, one of the pioneers of modern European choreography, can't have been easy for the Swedish dance-maker Mats Ek, at least judging by the way the theme of mother- hood is treated in some of his best-known narrative creations.
In the 1982 controversial contemporary adaptation of the Romantic ballet Giselle, which remains Ek's unsurpassed master- work, the poor mental condition of the heroine prevents her from sharing the joy of giving birth with her fellow female vil- lagers, who arrive on stage each rolling an enormous egg. And it is this denied moth- erhood that, at the end of Act I, triggers a bout of madness during which Giselle starts throwing the eggs around in a last act of rebellion against a society from which she has been outcast. Similarly, in Ek's 1987 Swan Lake, the action focuses on and develops from the complex, almost incestu- ous mother/son relationship between a Hamlet-like Prince Siegfried and a Gertrude-like Queen Mother. Not to men- tion that in Eks's choreographic translation of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, the part of the despotic Bernarda is assigned to a man in drag. In the old fairy-tale of The Sleeping Beauty, motherhood plays a significant role. According to Charles Perrault's original 17th-century text, the story begins with a Queen desperately wanting a baby. It is not surprising, therefore, that in his updated reading of the 1890 ballet, Ek has decided to take full advantage of this narrative component. Retitled Sleeping Beauty, where the absence of the definite article might be read as indicative of the differences between this version and the old ballet, Ek's work has nothing of the phoney aristo- cratic splendour of its choreographic antecedent. Deprived of the masses of court people, princes, royal nurses, nymphs, fairy-tale characters and fairy attendants that usually populate the 1890 ballet, Ek's story is more in line with the unflattering greyness of everyday reality. The Queen and King are thus portrayed as a loving middle-class couple whose greatest thrills are the acquisition of a new car and the arrival of a new baby. The music of the ballet's Prologue, therefore, does not underscore Princess Aurora's sumptuous christening party any longer. Instead it is used to accompany the dra- matic narration of the couple's story, from his coming back home with the car to their rush to the hospital, where the Queen, sur- rounded by four rather ambiguous nurses who are all that are left of the ballet's six good fairies, produces an egg with the help of an even more ambiguous surgeon, the modern day incarnation of the wicked fairy Carabosse. Thus far, the various 'modern' ideas are not bad at all. After all, the evil fairy — traditionally played by a man has always been synonymous with that inescapable destiny to which every human being is subjected. It's a pity that once the modern equivalent of the 1890 Prologue is over, things start to go downhill, both in dramatic and choreographic terms. Apart from some amusing moments, such as the picnic set to that hideously bucolic garland waltz in Act I, or the stereotypical representation of Aurora's suitors, Ek's reading becomes more and more obscure and loses its dramatic tension. It remains unclear why the Prince must be an angry member of the audience who, after a lot of shouting, shoots Carabosse who in the meantime has become Aurora's boyfriend who has turned her into a drug addict. And it remains unclear whether the black egg that emerges at the end from the Princess's womb is to be seen as her punishment for a trashy life or more simply as a memento of her relationship with Carabosse, given that both on video and in the performance I saw Carabosse is interpreted by a non-Cau- casian male dancer.
Ek has not been brave enough to break free from the structural constraints of the score, originally composed to accommo- date a series of choreographic numbers. All he has come up with is mere replacement of the old ornamental choreographic con- ventions with a debatable hotchpotch of trite and undeveloped theatrical answers, that encompass the parody of a television Cookery programme and the superfluous Presence on stage of virago-like 'grand- mothers'. Consequently, the production suffers greatly from the lack of that dra- matic immediacy found in works such as the 1982 Giselle and makes one wonder if Mr Ek should keep 'revisiting' the classics '3r move onto something completely different.
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