Marcos Morau‘s daring rereading of Tchaikovsky’s famous 1890 ballet turns Sleeping Beauty into an allegory of our relationship with time. The Catalan choreographer’s rich visual universe reinterprets the princess’s long sleep as a wild and uninhibited procession.
What does the story of Sleeping Beauty — and Tchaikovsky’s 1890 ballet of the same name — mean to us today? What would Princess Aurora discover if she woke up from her long sleep in the modern world? Marcos Morau, attracted by the idea of twisting the imaginary, has condensed the substance of the fairy tale to focus on the expansion of time. Set in an unlikely non-place, a vortex modifying space-time, he has conceived a performance for 15 dancers that mirrors our reality. Using all the tools of theatre and dance, Sleeping Beauty creates a meticulous visual universe, a fluctuating space-time populated by ghostly images, where the organic mixes with the geometric, the abstract with the incarnate. Between illusion and reality, this Sleeping Beauty forms “an unstoppable, frantic, chaotic procession”, populated by mysterious figures.