Fresh fairy tale RWB presents reimagined version of beloved Tchaikovsky classic By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:07 PM CDT Monday, Mar. 9, 2026

The classics tend to be the classics for a reason, and The Sleeping Beauty, the classical fairy-tale ballet choreographed by French-Russian master Marius Petipa to Tchaikovsky’s masterwork score, is no exception.

But that doesn’t mean they have to be done the way they’ve always been done.

The version the Royal Winnipeg Ballet will perform at the Centennial Concert Hall this week is an adaptation by the company’s new artistic director, Christopher Stowell, which was created for the Oregon Theatre Ballet in 2010 and is now part of three other companies’ repertoires.

“Part of my mission, I think, in keeping this art form that I love relevant, alive and on people’s minds and appealing to people, is to take a work that has been part of the repertoire for a long time, like Sleeping Beauty,” he says. “It’s 100-and-something years old, and I love it, and I value it, and it has an important place in our history.

“It’s important for dancers to dance and audiences to see, but a 21st-century audience is not a 19th-century audience.”

To wit: The Sleeping Beauty — which tells the even older story of Princess Aurora, cursed as a baby by the evil fairy Carabosse to sleep for 100 years, only to be woken by true love’s kiss — is Tchaikovsky’s longest ballet, with a staggering original full-length run time of four hours (including intermissions).

“Now, I love ballet, but I don’t want to see a four-hour Sleeping Beauty,” Stowell says.

“My approach to these is that they have a certain narrative momentum, so we’re not feeling stalled by one more procession of dancers in fancy costumes, and that it’s a fun evening in the theatre and not something that at one point we feel like we’re enduring,” he says. “I also want all of these ballets to be really challenging to the whole company, and not just two leading dancers.”

Luckily, The Sleeping Beauty is already a meaty ensemble work, one that requires everyone to be at the tippy-top of their game. Because of this, it’s been a perfect project for Stowell to work on with his new company.

“Now, I love ballet, but I don’t want to see a four-hour Sleeping Beauty.”

“In some ways, within the ballet world, the theme of Sleeping Beauty is striving for beauty and perfection, striving for truth in your dancing, because it’s so revealing,” he says. “What I feel like I’m really doing is sharing my values about dance through how we’re going to dance this ballet.

“It’s been a remarkable period of creativity and growth and getting to know each other, being able to instil these things that are really important to me, in real time.”

The story of The Sleeping Beauty isn’t just told through the choreography. It’s also told through the music, says incoming RWB music director Ming Luke, who will be conducting the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for this week’s shows. (Former music director Julian Pellicano has moved on to the National Ballet of Canada.)

“Tchaikovsky was known for elevating the music of ballet, instead of music for ballet just being more or less background music,” says the American conductor, who is also the music director for the Nashville Ballet. “The collaboration that he had with the choreographer, Marius Petipa, was much more connected and collaborative than in the past, where the dancing actually would be created without knowing the music.”

There are so many intricate musical details audiences can keep an ear out for, such as the scene in which Carabosse is attacking baby Aurora and she’s laughing.

“That’s actually written in the music; in the rehearsal process, I’m working with the orchestra to try to really make it sound like laughing,” he says.

He also points to a scene in which vines are climbing the castle in which Aurora is sleeping, “and in the music, you can hear the strings kind of winding around as if they are the vines. Every aspect of it has such attention to detail. It’s such engaging music.”

He’s not kidding about attention to detail; for the Sapphire Fairy Variation, for example, “Petipa said to Tchaikovsky that sapphires typically have five facets, and so Tchaikovsky wrote that music in five counts.”

Conducting for ballet, Luke says, is its own art form.

“It’s like accompanying a concerto or soloist — except the orchestra doesn’t hear the soloist,” he says.

Luke’s job is to be responsive and supportive to the dancers onstage. He points to the ballet’s famous Rose Adagio, in which Aurora meets her suitors on her 16th birthday and asserts her independence, as an example.

“She’s like, ‘I don’t need a man, I can balance by myself.’ And the choreography is symbolic of that. She just balances by herself. How well or long she can balance, we can help her along with that. If it looks like, ‘Oh, you know what, it looks like she’s gonna stay there for a few seconds more,’ we can adjust to that.

Luke says The Sleeping Beauty is considered one of the most difficult ballets, because there are so many different variations.

“Which means that if you are a good ballet conductor, you’re trying to really make sure that the variations are exactly what the dancers need, which can be very different from night to night,” he says.

Still, he relishes the challenge.

“It’s one of my favourite ballets. It’s always a joy to work on.”

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