‘The prince takes a lifetime to find the palace. He kisses Aurora. He breaks the spell. When the inhabitants of the palace wake up, they realise that time didn’t stop at the moment they fell asleep. While they were sleeping, they were ageing.’ These are more or less the words I’ve used whenever, over the last few months, I’ve tried to explain to someone what Sleeping Beauty is.

The idea of reinventing a ‘classic’ emerged from conversations with Luísa Taveira, the driving force behind the Companhia Maior project. Invited to direct the first creation by this company, I always assumed that this show would also serve to invent and affirm an artistic identity. A group of performers over the age of 60 and with experience in various areas, willing to risk confronting the work of contemporary creators. The ‘classic’, inscribed on the collective imagination, allowed us to use a vocabulary that spanned generations. Being a classical ballet, it was possible to mix disciplines, principally dance and music, but also theatre. I had my first contact with this cast months before rehearsals began, during a ten-day workshop, where we explored personal memories to create fragments and scenes. The awakening of each of the artists with this project found its metaphorical version in the narrative of Sleeping Beauty and the trick of using the past as fuel for the present seemed to me to be the starting point for an adaptation. The past that feeds us in this show is also the artistic tradition of the ‘classic’ debuted in Saint Petersburg, without much success, 120 years ago. Here, Tchaikovsky’s music or Petipa’s choreography fade into memories of characters and performers. 

We could talk about a comment on artistic tradition, but I am more interested in the notion of inheritance. Because tradition is fixed and doesn’t belong to us. But an inheritance, we can spend as we like. We own it.

In Sleeping Beauty, the symbolisms are subverted, analysed or taken literally. An inheritance is owned, always attempting a poetry of the memory. A memory that pursues us or flees from us. A memory that imprisons or frees us. But, inevitably, the memory that is the source of energy that lights up the present.

Tiago Rodrigues