The story of Sleeping Beauty contains many layers of interpretation – from the fairy tales of Perrault and the Grimm brothers to Tchaikovsky’s ballet. What thread did you follow through this story?
When I started thinking about the idea for this piece, I wanted to evoke everything that Sleeping Beauty doesn’t perceive – because she’s asleep. I wanted to work with everything that happens while she’s asleep, to describe the environment around her. Little by little, as I researched and discovered the different versions of the story, as well as the different choreographies – by Petipa or Nureyev – a question emerged: why do Sleeping Beauty today? What sense does this story still have? It’s an old story, with a rather old-fashioned content, which no longer has any real connection with the contemporary world... The story of the prince who comes to rescue the princess no longer evokes much of what love might be like today. The ending of the story is perceived as violence, not as an act of love: there is no consent to the kiss she receives. What else can we learn from this tale? So I’d say that the plot of the fairy tale only interests me insofar as I can draw out its potential for paradox. On the other hand, I love playing with structures – and the structure of the tale is an interesting one: according to the traditional version, the princess is born. The king and queen hold a celebration, to which the godmothers are invited, each offering a gift to the princess. An evil fairy, who had not been invited, puts a curse on the princess. But the spell is finally lifted by another fairy – who turns death into sleep. That’s the starting structure. What would happen if, instead of falling asleep on her 16th birthday, Aurora had been asleep all her life? What would happen if, instead of being “the one who falls asleep”, the princess was “the one who doesn’t wake up”? If we imagine this reversal of the situation, Sleeping Beauty becomes a well of revelations about the relationship between the frenetic illusion of the awake (which is another mode of sleep), and the nameless, hopeless, futureless oblivion of a sleep that is self-sufficient, beyond all existence. This is the direction I’m working in: Aurora will be asleep for most of the play. It may even be that Aurora’s sleep is merely the invention, the fetish of a court, of a world, that desperately needs to wait for something to awaken as a redemption – and that fills that need with an unbridled race towards annihilation. Haunted by this boundless sleep, the court and the whole world become Aurora’s nightmare. The whole story is one of frightened somnambulism. All human time – such an important element in the plot of the tale – is nothing but falling and rushing. I’d like to convey this feeling of broadening identity; not to remain confined to typical roles, the good girl, the bad girl, but to produce a vertigo of identities. Storytelling has changed a lot over the years. What I’d like to succeed in transcribing is not the story itself, but the feeling of the story, its dilation. I’d like the audience to have experienced the feeling of the story by the end of the piece – through the music and temperament of the dancers. Another idea that was important to me was to think: what if the princess woke up today, in our time? Imagine she fell asleep 100 years ago and woke up today... Is it worth giving up 100 years of oblivion, 100 years of mythical solitude, for this ruin, this desert, this wreck of reality? I want to generate a feeling of chaos, of apocalypse, as if the world had disappeared, as if time, in its acceleration, had corrupted everything. What happens if you are absent from your life, your story and history in general – and everything continues? Who would receive the gift of a coveted Aurora – if no one is there to covet it, if the very lucidity of the awakened has become madness?
Does this to-and-fro between past and present lead to changes in the various spectacular elements?
The idea of confronting ideas or images from the past with the contemporary world is something that is present in most of my works. In Sleeping Beauty, the costumes are going to be very important in expressing this mixture of eras. We have tried to construct their aesthetic as a fusion of different centuries. The space will be more linked to the future – a strange space that belongs neither to the past nor to the present. To a certain extent, the music will be Tchaikovsky’s – to which will be added musical elements composed by Cristóbal Saavedra – inspired by Tchaikovsky’s universe, but adding different nuances, bringing a more dreamlike, nocturnal world, and bringing the original music into dialogue with its own myth and with the myth of Petipa’s ballet.
In terms of choreography, I’m also going to play with references to ballet – in a twisted way. I’m not interested in doing my own “classical” version of the piece. It’s a radical proposal, very theatrical. Certain situations give the impression that the performers are speaking – when in fact they are merely evoking speech through their movement. In this way, they set the mood, the temperature of the piece – beauty, calm, drama, nightmare, then calm again... I don’t yet know how the piece will resolve itself – it’s a work in progress. There will also be some text – in the form of songs. These songs will take the form of variations on Tchaikovsky’s themes, and the texts of these songs will be quite poetic, like lullabies that question the meaning of sleep as an event in a fable and as a cultural symbol... Very quiet songs, like the lullabies you sing to a child to put it to sleep...
In the ballet versions – Petipa’s, Nureyev’s – many circumstances are invented to provoke choreographic situations, so that Aurora can be seen dancing. Petipa’s paradox was that he wanted to make a ballet out of a tale whose protagonist was generally “inactive”. For my part, I don’t want to make her dance, to know how she dances, but rather to understand what is happening around her while she sleeps: to what extent are Aurora’s gestures and behaviour a representation, a fiction, a manipulation of others? What does it mean to grow up, to become a young woman, then an adult, without even knowing it?
How have the dancers of the Lyon Opera Ballet integrated your aesthetic, your compositional methods and your highly methodical, perfectionist approach to movement?
For me, it was important to take time with the company’s dancers to introduce my body language. I’m very precise and methodical in my approach to movement; there’s no room for approximation. But it’s not just a mannerism, it’s an aesthetic foundation; that’s why it’s important to take this time to understand what this language is about, what it’s trying to express. It’s impossible to come into a company and start work abruptly: you need time to look together, to experiment, to try out different options, to get lost too.
In the act of creation, there is play and experimentation. Some intuitions, some decisions disappear, others remain and grow. For me, creating means playing with oneself, with crises, roles and doubts. We don’t have much time left – but I think that’s a good situation for what the play is about: it’s a bit of a race against time.
The idea of working with what happens around the princess has a very photographic dimension. How do you work with the frame?
The performers exist within an image – both physically and conceptually. They are inside a closed box – which acts like a frame, very photographic. The colours accentuate the pictorial aspect: everything is red, and the performers are dressed in white – with clothes made up of several layers. I like to create images in several dimensions, acting on an aesthetic, plastic level. In the structure of the piece, I wanted to exaggerate the contrast between the beginning, which is very full, very carnal – we see the skin, we see the living body, we see beings that are still human – and the sequence where the world empties out, and things disappear, where everything that is fiction, mask or lie (of bodies, gestures and space) slips away, to become nothing more than a stripped-down truth.
Excerpt from an interview by Gilles Amalvi, October 2022