Above the water, ballet looks effortless. Beneath it lies discipline, repetition, resilience and a remarkable amount of work. In this week’s In My View, RNZB Artistic Director Ty King-Wall talks The Sleeping Beauty, the illusion of perfection and why ballet may be the perfect antidote to our distracted age.
There is a particular kind of lie a swan tells.
Above the water, everything is serenity. White feathers. Long neck. Aristocratic indifference.
Below the surface, the feet are working like hell.
Ballet has always understood this trick.
The Royal New Zealand Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty is full of the sort of beauty that appears to have simply materialised: glittering courts, enchanted forests, impossible bodies moving through Tchaikovsky as though gravity were merely a suggestion.
Yet behind every effortless turn sits repetition, discipline, bruises, aching feet and the stubborn refusal to give up.
When I ask RNZB Artistic Director Ty King-Wall what he wants us to feel when the curtain first rises, his answer is wonderfully simple.
“Anticipation!”
The real breath-taking moment, he promises, comes later.
No spoilers.
“Stay true to the feeling it gives you, that sense of magic and wonder, and you can’t go wrong.”
Waking an old story
Perhaps that is the secret of The Sleeping Beauty.
More than a century after its creation, we still know the curse, the sleep, the kiss and the ending, yet we willingly return to be enchanted again.
For King-Wall, the answer lies in escapism.
“It transports you to another place, a different time and realm.”
That realm sits somewhere between the human and the supernatural, helped enormously by Tchaikovsky’s score, which does so much of the storytelling that words become unnecessary.
This production, created by Greg Horsman for the RNZB in 2011, has now lived several lives.
The challenge of reviving it, says King-Wall, is not to pickle it in theatrical aspic but to protect its heart while allowing new dancers to inhabit it.
“Stay true to the feeling it gives you, that sense of magic and wonder, and you can’t go wrong.”
The work beneath the water
And then, of course, there is the work beneath the water.
Ask King-Wall what he looks for in a dancer beyond technique and the answer comes with comic insistence.
“Resilience, work ethic, self-sufficiency, work ethic, individuality, work ethic, and reflection. And work ethic!”
Perfection, he says, is “an unattainable, irrelevant, uninteresting distraction.”
That may be my favourite line of the conversation.
“Perfection is an unattainable, irrelevant, uninteresting distraction.”
Technique matters, certainly, but only because it gives the dancer somewhere from which to escape.
King-Wall calls it “the compass which you use to explore.”
It is a beautiful idea: discipline not as a prison, but as the thing that makes freedom possible.
“Perfection is an unattainable, irrelevant, uninteresting distraction.”
Technique matters, certainly, but only because it gives the dancer somewhere from which to escape.
King-Wall calls it “the compass which you use to explore.”
It is a beautiful idea: discipline not as a prison, but as the thing that makes freedom possible.
Building the dream
The same balance is present across the production.
Horsman’s choreography, Gary Harris’s sets and costumes, Jon Buswell’s lighting, Tchaikovsky’s music and a little Wētā Workshop sorcery all have to disappear into a single dream.
And dreams, despite appearances, require excellent administration.
The RNZB is taking this enormous fairytale around Aotearoa – dancers, giant sets, hundreds of costumes and all.
King-Wall points out that touring has been part of the company’s rhythm for 73 years.
Still, moving an enchanted kingdom from town to town is no small thing.
There is something rather lovely about that too.
The antidote
At a time when culture increasingly arrives in fifteen-second bursts, The Sleeping Beauty asks us to do something almost radical:
Sit down.
Stay still.
Pay attention.
“Isn’t it the best antidote?” King-Wall asks.
It may well be.
Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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