Alexei Ratmansky’s 2015 production of Sleeping Beauty for American Ballet Theater caused a rather unprecedented stir in the dance community. The choreographer’s new version of Marius Petipa’s classic ballet wed elements of the first 1890 production for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, preserved in dance notations from the early 1900s (with abundant archival material detailing its costumes, sets, and lighting) with designs inspired by the 1921 Diaghilev production, surely the most opulent staging in the ballet’s history. Ratmansky’s esteem as the twenty-first century’s pre-eminent maker of ballets added to this unusual juxtaposition of choreography based on the original with visual elements from the ballet’s first significant restaging and its audiences’ reception of the new work. His reputation as an auteur choreographer, one who leaves personal stamp on each historical work he revives, lent an additional layer of complexity to conversations in the press, social media, and theater lobbies.

The result left dance professionals and audience members alike to ponder a set of questions concerning historical performance, authenticity, and the role of the re-stager/choreographer, as well as the ephemeral nature of ballet as an art form and how best to preserve it. Scholl’s lecture will explore these questions, using video and musical examples.

Tim Scholl is a scholar of Russian and dance historian who has written two books on the history of Russian dance: From Petipa to Balanchine, Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet (Routledge 1994) and Sleeping Beauty, a Legend in Progress (Yale 2004). Professor of Russian and comparative literature at Oberlin College, Scholl is also a docent in the Theatre Research Department of Helsinki University, where he held a Fulbright teaching/research fellowship in 2000-01.His current research examines Russian and Soviet ballet as an artifact of empire and explores the ballet’s engagement with borders and borderlands, from the purported foreign ‘domination’ of the Russian ballet in the nineteenth century through the cultural exchange process of the post-World War II years.