Andrey Kaydanovskiy: The Sleeping Beauty

Year: 2024
Country: Austria
Composer: Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Choreographer: Andrey Kaydanovskiy
Stage designer: Karoline Hogl
Costume designer: Melanie Frost
Lighting designer: Christian Kass
Cast: Elisa Lodolini, Misha Hall, Angelica Mattiazzi, Ilia Dergousoff, Yu-Teng Huang
Genre: ballet
Runtime: 75 min.
Age: 18+
Andrey Kaidanovsky is arguably the ultimate trickster of the global ballet scene. He rejects rules, draws no inspiration from his predecessors, moves against the grain, and creates productions that are bold, controversial, decidedly non-classical — yet always deeply compelling. "The Sleeping Beauty" is no exception. This dance piece, created for the Linz ballet company, is a story of coming-of-age and youthful rebellion — as grotesque as it is ruthless. 

Kaidanovsky mercilessly dissects a glossy world where behind a beautiful facade lie indifference, exhaustion, and emptiness; a world where it matters more to seem than to be, where rules and style are everything, and love is just part of a picture-perfect ideal. 

His Aurora is a quintessential teenager trying to break free from a familiar, suffocating world. Strangely enough, it is the curse of the fairy Carabosse that helps her do so. Thanks to the revenge exacted upon her, the girl finds herself outside her own world — though perhaps this only happens in her imagination. Amid a series of strange encounters and dangerous attempts at growing up, she eventually runs into a "nice boy." And that encounter marks the beginning of her journey into adulthood — a place where there is little room for love but plenty of rules and pressure to "be like everyone else." 

As Kaidanovsky himself admits, his style is a balance between the genres he inherited from his parents — ballerina Natalia Sudakova and actor Alexander Kaidanovsky. He seeks a compromise between dance and dramatic theatre, seasoning this blend with performance art, absurdist comedies, and much more. And "The Sleeping Beauty", which echoes the choreographer's own youthful rebellion, is an excellent example of this "synthetic" approach to ballet.