Sleeping Beauty

In the production of Sleeping Beauty, Princess Aurora is a rebellious teenager who goes against her life of privilege and purses a love with a heroin addict. Instead of a spinning wheel from the original story, it is replaced by a syringe. In this Version, Princess Aurora learns that there is no happy endings.

Swedish choreographer Mats Ek regularly causes a sensation with his exciting new interpretations of famous classical ballets. When, in 1996, he took on that most sugary ballet of the tsarist Romantic period, Sleeping Beauty, he also updated the action. Ek’s Aurora is not a sheltered princess, but a rebellious teenager who does not feel at ease in her parent’s house and flees into a world of superficial appearances. Through the wicked Carabosse she comes into contact with drugs, until she awakes from this world of illusion and begins to become an adult. Mats Ek radically dusts down the Tchaikovsky classic. Without losing the reference to the original, he replaces Petipa’s technical showstoppers with narrative dance that is subtly in harmony with the characters and extremely humorous. In quest of new forms, he leads the audience into an unknown world of seeing and experience, making possible a new and refreshing perspective on an apparently well-known fairy tale.

Although Mats Ek’s Version of Sleeping Beauty was originally set on the Hamburg Ballet before putting it on the Cullberg Ballet, the performers is what made it possible. Doing a work from Mats Ek is not something that is so easy. I believe it does not just take physicality but mentality. Performing this piece is historic. Mats Ek takes this “pretty”ballet and turns into something surreal. It’s about reality and in one’s perspective, having any part of this process is significant and remarkable.

“Ek may ask his dancers to go to some very odd places but the Cullberg Ballet follow him with ardent alarcity.” – Judith Mackrell, The Guardian.

Svansjön by Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek Giselle by Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek Carmen by Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek Bernardas Hus by Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek the Place by Mats Ek Spöksonaten by Mats Ek