From the Beautiful to the Sublime: Postmodern Transformation in The Sleeping Beauty

Abstract

From the Beautiful to the Sublime:Postmodern Transformation in The Sleeping Beauty Elizabeth Elam Roth (bio) If one ballet has come to incarnate the grace and elegance of the entire art form, it is The Sleeping Beauty, first presented in 1890 in St. Petersburg. Its choreography exemplifies the precision and beauty that we associate with classical dance. The decor of the original production and of most restagings was similarly refined, containing elements of both the baroque art of the seventeenth century (the era in which La Belle au Bois Dormant was introduced) and the rococo that followed.1 Yet despite its ability to quicken the "play of the imagination," beauty, writes Immanuel Kant, fails to stir the senses in the quantifiable manner of the sublime (83). Beauty is limited, he claims, by definite boundaries and by charm, is restful and contemplative (85); in contrast, the sublime produces a sensation of wonder and respect, "a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them" (83). Until recently, the only component of The Sleeping Beauty that could be termed sublime has been the Tchaikovsky score.2 Throughout most of the ballet, it alludes to pain and disorder, to deceit and immodesty lying just beneath the conspicuous grandeur of the sets and costumes. It provokes in us, as Kant claims for the sublime, "a movement of the mind bound up with [judgment]" (85). Recently, however, England's Royal Ballet Company has staged a new production of The Sleeping Beauty, its signature work, designed by Maria Bjørnson. While the spirit and most of the steps of the original choreography remain unchanged, the decor has undergone a radical and sublime retooling. Bjøhighlights the psychological disparity between the symmetry of the dancing and the emotional disharmony of the music, thus giving the metaphors in the score a visual rendering and adding ballast to its psychological weight. Hers is a statement on the malevolence of social inequality and of what Frances Ferguson, writing on the sublime, calls "rational enthusiasm for processes in which human systemization [attempts to improve] upon nature" (133). Bjørnson ratifies Tchaikovsky's musical comprehension that people do not live happily ever after, and that despite what the libretto tells us and what we witness in the dancing, death is permanent and implacable. Her ground-breaking changes, I believe, are best considered in the context of the sublime, which enables us to understand how she has taken The Sleeping Beauty to a new metaphysical level, perhaps allowing us to see the fairytale as well as the ballet in a new light. Sublimity has a long and rigorous philosophical history, longer than that of beauty. Continental audiences were introduced to Longinus' "On the Sublime" via Nicholas Boileau's 1674 translation Traité du Sublime ou du Merveilleux dans le Discours Traduit du Grec de Longin at approximately the same time that the fairytale La Belle au Bois Dormant was circulating at Versailles, and found Longinus' pronouncement that "what inspires wonder . . . is always superior to what is merely convincing" (Fyfe 123) of aesthetic interest in an era that dwelled upon feelings. The next major comment on the sublime was Edmund Burke's 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which discovered the sublime in emotionally or geographically distanced or obscured terror and concluded that "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger [as threats to our well-being] . . . is a source of the sublime, that is, productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling" (36). At the end of the century (1790), Kant gave the sublime its most subjective reading thus far, locating the sublime in the viewer rather than in the sublime object or oratory. When overwhelmed by a crisis of the imagination, our minds make an automatic retreat to reason, he theorized. This recuperation is pleasant to us because it validates both the superiority of the rational mind and the feeling, in the moment at which our imagination confronts its sense of inadequacy, that we have a supersensibility (86-99). Finally, a century later, Sigmund Freud suggested that we often unconsciously...