Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty
Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty
- BBO provided marketing and press services for this production
- Played a limited tour with a total of 70 performances
- Seen by more than 112,000 patrons in 7 cities
- Launched in Des Moines in September 2013 and toured through December 2013
Matthew Bourne’s SLEEPING BEAUTY sees Britain’s most famed choreographer return to the music of Tchaikovsky to complete the trio of the composer’s ballet masterworks that started in 1992 with Nutcracker! and, most famously, in 1995, with the international hit Swan Lake. Bourne is the only British artist to have won a Tony Award® on Broadway for both Best Choreographer and Best Director and has won over 50 international awards for his choreographic work, including the Broadway production of Mary Poppins.
Matthew Bourne’s haunting new scenario is a gothic tale for all ages; the traditional tale of good vs. evil and rebirth is turned upside-down, creating a supernatural love story, across the decades, that even the passage of time itself cannot hinder.
Perrault’s timeless fairy tale, about a young girl cursed to sleep for one hundred years, was turned into a legendary ballet by Tchaikovsky and choreographer, Marius Petipa, in 1890. Bourne takes this date as his starting point, setting the Christening of Aurora, the story’s heroine, in the year of the ballet’s first performance; the height of the Fin-de-Siecle period when fairies, vampires and decadent opulence fed the gothic imagination. As Aurora grows into a young woman, we move forwards in time to the more rigid, uptight Edwardian era; a mythical golden age of long Summer afternoons, croquet on the lawn and new dance crazes. Years later, awakening from her century long slumber, Aurora finds herself in the modern day; a world more mysterious and wonderful than any Fairy story!