Product: Sleeping Beauty [VHS] (1996)
Rating: 4.0
Superb Sizova and Soloviev
If you know "Sleeping Beauty", the reason to have this "Beauty" is the superlative dancing by Sizova and Soloviev. Nobody dances like them any more, and it's our loss. Sizova dances with a spontaneity and musical emphasis unlike any other Kirov dancer I've ever seen. Her Aurora was a vital part of the Kirov's first sensational tours of the West in the 1960s; curiously, I saw her dance Princess Florine at the Kirov in Act III in 1984, and even then she was dancing with amazing freshness - alas, by that point, a freshness unlike anyone in the company. Even though Soloviev isn't really a prince (he was a very famous Bluebird), he becomes a hero like no other - utterly innocent and caught up in the story as if for the first time. Latterday Kirov or Western dancers would dance this ballet with more attention to minor technical perfection and with less feeling for dance and music and character. To watch how Sizova's torso is always alive through each dance is glorious, and the way that Soloviev effortlessly phrases his series of double tours en l'air like a continuous outpouring of one single ardent thought (whereas most dancers present them like one technical cliche after another) is thrilling even if you've seen this ballet more than two hundred times in the theatre. When I first saw this film in the early 1980s, the Kirov was seldom seen in Britain or America, and it was one kind of revelation. It doesn't, however, represent how the Kirov's production worked in the theatre, it has a partly bad text (Carabosse danced on pointe and acted heavily by Natalia Dudinskaya), and it's heavily cut. Now that I've seen the Kirov and its various "Beauty" productions many times, this film is a different kind of revelation: what the Kirov was like before it became congealed by academicism. Makarova is the best of a mainly good supporting company; if you know your Kirov "Beauty"s, most of the dances here are alive as they aren't in later Kirov videos. But Sizova and Soloviev are the great reason to have this tape.