The Sleeping Beauty

The Sleeping Beauty

Hi everybody, Mary here.

So, as #TheatreWeek is now at its middle, here is the review for another really classic yet important ballet, an adaptation of the tale by Charles Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty. Without any further ado, let's get started, shall we ?

The Sleeping Beauty : a wonderful adaptation for a very classic tale

The very first point that I will talk about is the adaptation itself. The story itself is different from the original tale. In this ballet, the king Florestan invites fairies and people to celebrate his daughter's birth, however, as fairies give Aurora gifts such as beauty, generosity, and so on, the Carabosse fairy shows up, as she was uninvited, and is very upset about that fact, to the point that she curses Aurora to be stung by a needle and die at the age of sixteen. Hopefully, the Lilac fairy hadn't given her her gift, so she diminishes the curse and Aurora will only have to sleep for a hundred years before being awoken by the kiss of a prince. At her sixteenth birthday, it happens, Aurora falls asleep, and the Lilac fairy decides that the entire castle will be in a slumber for a century as well. A hundred years later, the prince Désiré shows up and sees an illusion of the princess. As he falls in love with that image of pure beauty, he asks the fairy to show him the way to the castle, protected by magic plants. He kisses her, waking her up and the entire castle does the same. In the end, the wedding is celebrated, and a big party is thrown. The Lilac fairy is there to celebrate their union.

The second point is about the story itself : while the princess herself doesn't seem to do a lot of things, the Lilac fairy is the one practically maintaining the order in the kingdom, saving the princess from her curse, and guiding the prince to the castle so he can wake up the princess. The fairies in this kingdom are very important as they provide gifts to the princess and are very respected, or like Carabosse, very feared by the community. In a world of magic where humans are at the mercy of powerful creatures, strength is needed to survive.

The third and very last point is about the original tale, I will remind you that in the original tale, when Aurora is asleep, she isn't found by a prince but by a king who rapes her in her sleep, causing her to have twins and wake up to the pain of childbirth. After all,  the classic fairy tales, before being adapted by Disney, were horror stories made to terrify young women as men in this era were kind of misogynistic and rude towards women.

Conclusion : It's a very beautiful ballet,  that needs to be seen, mostly for the wonderful part of the Lilac fairy, children and adults alike can watch it without many problems.

Okay, that's it for today, I hope that you liked this post and I will see you very soon with another one, I hope !

And as usual, our last word : KIDNEYS !