Dancer's Dream: The Great Ballets of Rudolf Nureyev - Sleeping Beauty

Rating:
Summary: Another masterpiece in this Paris Opera Ballet series.
Review: This ballet documentary is one of a series on ballets put together by Rudolf Nureyev for the Paris Opera Ballet.(You might find it helpful to read my reviews of the others, as well.) This documentary also includes the history of the ballet and the story of Sleeping Beauty, as well as rehearsals and lots of coaching discussions.(If you are only intersted in a performance of Sleeping Beauty this may not be for you.) By seeing some of the solo variations in rehearsal you can see more detail and gain more insight than in performance, most of the time(but not always!). Watching Elisabeth Platel(she plays princess Aurora) dance and work in rehearsal is an amazing experience. They also show us the special choreography Nureyev provided for the prince, danced by Manuel Legris very accurately. It is amazing!
In this documintary it is Patricia Ruanne (former ballerina with the Royal Ballet) who is the one coaching the principal dancers (in the La Bayadere documentary it was Ghislaine Thesmar). Her coaching is amazingly patient and professional, and a great deal of time is spent on this. Many seamless cuts are made between actual performance, dress rehearsal, and classroom rehearsal, and this helps keep it lively(this is done in all their documentaries in this series). Finally, the costumes, the colors, the scenary(the set designer, Ezio Frigerio, is also interviewed), the video quality, and the sound are all first class!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to The Sleeping Beauty
Review: This DVD is an excellent introduction to the current production of Rudolf Nureyev's version of "The Sleeping Beauty" as danced by the Paris Opera Ballet. Expertly narrated by étoile Elisabeth Platel, one of the great Parisian Aurora's of the last decades, this documentary takes you back to St. Petersburg and the origins of "The Sleeping Beauty", as the pinnacle of classical ballet in 1890, before moving to the work of Nureyev at the Paris Opera and the staging of his Beauty in 1989.

As in the other titles of this series "Dancer's Dream", the documentary seamlessly mixes interviews with dancers and ballet masters, with fragments of studio rehearsals and actual performance (danced by Platel and Manuel Legris), and forms the ideal companion to the full-length performance of "The Sleeping Beauty" by the Paris Opera Ballet, also available on DVD.