SLEEPING BEAUTY AWOKE TO CONTROVERSY
Lecture offers intimate look at the revival of a classic ballet

In the classic ballet Sleeping Beauty, a spellbound princess is awakened after an interval of 100 years by the kiss of a prince; in the final act, the pair marries in a ceremony joyously celebrated by all. But when the ballet itself was revived, after more than 100 years' accretion of "a thick patina of tradition," the response was less than unanimous acclaim. So says dance historian Tim Scholl, who had a hand in Sleeping Beauty's revival. On Thursday, Oct. 27, Scholl will discuss the historical reconstruction of the dance and the unexpected controversy it sparked in a talk titled "Waking Sleeping Beauty: Reviving a Pre-Revolutionary Ballet in Post-Soviet St. Petersburg." The talk will take place at 5 p.m. in Thomas 110.

Scholl, an associate professor of Russian at Oberlin College and the director of Oberlin's Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, is the author of From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet (1994) and Sleeping Beauty: A Legend in Progress, released this year by Yale University Press. His perspective on the restaging of Sleeping Beauty is particularly intimate: he helped lead officials of the Maryinsky (formerly Kirov) Ballet of St. Petersburg to some invaluable documentation of the original 1890 production's choreography. His chronicle of the reconstruction of the Maryinsky's signal work is a tale of historical sleuthing that illuminates the difficulty of interpreting historical evidence as well as the political conflict that often surrounds and shapes cultural production.

Scholl characterizes the Maryinsky, which nurtured such talents as Pavlova, Nijinsky, Nureyev and Baryshnikov, as "the cradle of classical ballet;" it was home to Petipa and Balanchine, who were the dominant choreographers of 19th- and 20th-century ballet, respectively. Sleeping Beauty, he says, "remains the company's crown jewel, one it has variously polished, cut, and reset for over a hundred years."

During a visit to St. Petersburg in 1997, Scholl learned that the Maryinsky's new, post-Soviet management was in the process of reviving several hallmark works. He asked whether the ballet's officials planned to consult Harvard University Library's collection of the manuscripts of Nikolai Sergeyev, a Maryinsky balletmaster who fled the 1917 revolution and settled in the United States. To his amazement, he learned that the Maryinsky's balletmasters were unaware of the existence of the collection. Upon leaving Russia, he traveled to Harvard to look into the Sergeyev collection and found a surprisingly thorough notation of the original Sleeping Beauty, including substantial portions of pantomime and choreography that had been lost over the years. He faxed the documents to St. Petersburg and helped set in motion the process of reconstruction that he documents in his most recent book.

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