The Sleeping Beauty (preview)

I got an opportunity to shoot The Sleeping Beauty, performed by Kremlin Ballet Theatre, Moscow, Russia. In lead roles Alexandra Timofeeva as princess Aurora and Mikhail Martyniuk as Prince Desiree. This is a preview post, more about this performance coming soon…

The Sleeping Beauty (Russian: Спящая красавица) is a ballet in a prologue and three acts, first performed in 1890. The music was composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The score was completed in 1889, and is the second of his three ballets. The original scenario was conceived by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, and is based on Charles Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant. The choreographer of the original production was Marius Petipa. The premiere performance took place at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1890. The work has become one of the classical repertoire’s most famous ballets.

The Kremlin Ballet Theatre was born in 1990 on the initiative of its founder and present artistic director, Andrei Petrov. He knew this huge stage well – he had danced on it as a Bolshoi Ballet soloist since 1965, when he joined the country’s first ballet company after graduating from the Moscow Academy of Choreography (the former Moscow Ballet School). At that time, the Kremlin Palace was the State Academic Bolshoi Theatre of Russia’s second stage and its productions were shown here on a regular basis. Later on, when the Bolshoi stopped using the Kremlin Palace, Petrov had the idea of creating an independent company, based on this theatre. The idea won the active support of Russian ballet people. The outstanding dancers Ekaterina Maximova and Vladimir Vasiliev began to collaborate with the new Company, Vasiliev transferring to the Kremlin stage his ballet Macbeth (music by Kyril Molchanov), premièred at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1980. And so the young Kremlin Ballet Company opened with Macbeth..

Photos by Jack Devant © with kind permission of the Birgitta Festival 2013 and Kremlin Ballet Theatre, special thanks to Heili Vaus-Tamm and Andrei Petrov.