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From fairy tales to ballets, "Sleeping Beauty" has always exuded a fascinating charm. For a hundred years, the dance treasure "Sleeping Beauty" has been performed on stages all over the world for a long time, and the adaptations are not limited. At the 34th Macao Arts Festival, Marco Morao, winner of the Spanish National Dance Award, joined hands with the Lyon Opera Ballet to present the contemporary ballet "Sleeping Beauty", adding a bit of strange magic to lead the audience into the strange space of the Sleeping Princess.

"If Sleeping Beauty wakes up from the modern era, what will she find?" The Lyon Opera Ballet's version of "Sleeping Beauty" begins with this question. The story breaks our imagination of the original book. The princess on the stage has been sleeping, the prince has not come to save her, nor has there been a grand wedding. The story no longer focuses on justice and evil, but on the relationship between people and time. What does the passage of time mean to the sleeping princess and the awake person?

The play uses rich visual references to reinterpret the princess' long slumber into an unrestrained artistic conception.

What can this well-known fairy tale and Tchaikovsky's ballet convey to us today? Morau condenses the story and focuses on the expansion of time; he imagines a plausible and different space out of thin air, a whirlpool that changes time and space, and a performance by fifteen dancers that reflects the reality of the moment is born. This time, "Sleeping Beauty" uses all the elements of theater and dance to portray a clever visual space. In a floating space full of eerie imagery, organic and geometric, abstract and concrete merge. Between fantasy and reality, there is a "unstoppable and crazy mood" full of mysterious figures.

Marco Morau created a mysterious and paradoxical space in "Sleeping Beauty", fusing surreal and symbolic techniques in the classical story framework, making the dancers' twisted and bizarre body movements more ceremonial. Coupled with the integration of Tchaikovsky's music and contemporary music, it brings a double impact of vision and hearing, shaking the deepest part of the audience's mind!

In conversation with choreographer Marco Morau

Q: There are several versions of the story of "Sleeping Beauty," such as the fairy tale of Charles Perot and the Brothers Grimm, and the ballet of Tchaikovsky. Which is your creative blueprint?

A: When I started to conceive this work, I wanted to depict all the things that Sleeping Beauty cannot perceive because she is sleeping, to interpret everything that happens while she is sleeping, and to describe her surroundings. As I collected information, I gradually found that there are different versions of this story, as well as different interpretations by choreographers such as Petipa and Nureyev. A question arose: Why did you make "Sleeping Beauty"? What else is the meaning of this story? The story is old, outdated, and has no relevance to today's world... The plot of the prince saving the princess is no longer reminiscent of love today. The prince kisses the princess without her consent. What else can we learn from this? The plot of this fairy tale interests me only because there is a paradox in it.

On the other hand, I like to work with various structures, and the structure of this story is interesting. In the traditional version, after the princess is born, the king and queen celebrate her, and invite the godmother to attend, and they each give the princess a gift. An evil fairy comes uninvited and casts a death spell on the princess, which is eventually defused by another fairy, substituting sleep for death. This is the structure of the beginning of the story. What if the princess fell into a deep sleep for life, not on her sixteenth birthday? What if the princess didn't "fall into a deep sleep" but "never woke up"? If we imagine the opposite, "Sleeping Beauty" can bring out a series of revelations about the relationship between "the crazy imagination of awakening (another form of slumber) " and "the nameless, hopeless, and futureless slumber that can simultaneously satisfy itself and transcend all existence."

My creative direction is that Sleeping Beauty spends most of her time in a slumber. Her slumber may even be a fictional story of blind worship by the palace and the world, which are desperately waiting to be awakened by something to redeem themselves, and to satisfy these needs with the wanton rush of humanity to extinction. In the endless slumber, the palace and the whole world become a nightmare for the princess. The whole story is a sleepwalking full of fear. Human time is an important element in the story, but it just flies by. What I want to convey is this broad sense of identity, not limited by traditional characters such as good girls and bad girls, but creating multiple identities. The way stories are told has changed greatly over the years. What I hope to successfully adapt is not the story itself, but the artistic conception of the story, and the extension of the story. I wanted to use the music and the dancers' temperament to make the audience feel the feeling of the story before the end.

Another important idea is, what if the princess woke up in our time today? Imagine the princess fell asleep a hundred years ago and woke up in modern times... Is it worth giving up a hundred years of forgotten, a hundred years of solitude for this fallen, barren, broken reality? I want to create a frenzied, apocalyptic feeling, as if the world has disappeared, as if the passage of time has corrupted everything. What if you are absent from your life, your story, and your history, and everything goes on? If no one longs for the princess's gift, if the awakened go from waking to crazy, who will accept the gift of the much-admired princess?

Q: Will this interlacing of time and space between the past and the present change various important elements in the play?

A: Concepts and images of the past collide with the world of today, an idea that appears in most of my work. In "Sleeping Beauty," clothing is very important to express this era of confluence. To make the clothing more aesthetic, we tried to combine elements of clothing from different centuries. The space is more futuristic - a different space that does not belong to the past or the present. To a certain extent, the performance uses Tchaikovsky's music, which incorporates elements of Saavedra's music. These elements add some nuances to Tchaikovsky's music to create a more dreamy world of darkness, and also allow the original music to dialogue with itself and with Pettipa's ballet.

In terms of choreography, I would add ballet elements, but not traditional ballet. I don't plan to create my own "classical version" of "Sleeping Beauty". It's a radical idea, very dramatic. In some scenes, the performers seem to be talking, when in fact they just express it through movement. They use this to convey the mood and temperature of the work - beautiful, calm, intense, nightmarish, and then return to calm... I would also add some words through the song, in the form of variations on a Tchaikovsky theme, the lyrics are quite poetic, like a lullaby that questions the allegory of sleep and its meaning as a cultural symbol... It's a very peaceful song, like a lullaby to put a child to sleep...

Petipa and Nureyev included many choreographed scenes in their ballet, allowing the audience to see the dancing Sleeping Beauty. Petipa's paradox was to create a ballet based on a fairy tale in which the protagonist was mostly "inactive." I didn't want her to dance, nor to know how, but to understand what was going on around her while she was asleep: the extent to which the princess's gestures and actions could be used as symbols, fictional stories, or manipulation of others? What did it mean to grow up unknowingly, become a girl, and then become an adult?

Q: How did the dancers of the Lyon Opera Ballet incorporate your aesthetics, approach to composition, and orderly, perfectionist interpretation into your body movements?

A: I think it's important to spend more time letting dancers understand my body language. I require dancers to be precise and methodical, not to be tolerated. This is not only my consistent style, but also an aesthetic foundation. Therefore, it is necessary to take time to understand the meaning of the language and what it is meant to express. It is impossible to start work immediately after joining a dance company. It takes some time to explore, experiment and practice different solutions together, and to get lost together.

Creation is a process of experimentation and experimentation. Some intuitions and decisions are lost, while others are preserved and further developed. For me, creation is a process of trying different things with myself, which involves difficulties, responsibilities, and doubts.

Q: The idea of developing the story around what happened to the princess is very picturesque. How did you compose it?

A: Both physically and conceptually, the performers are in an image. They are in a sealed box, the box is like a picture frame, which is very picturesque. Color makes the image stand out even more: everything is red, and the performer is wearing a white multi-layered tutu. I hope to create more aesthetic and malleable images in different dimensions. As for the structure of the work, I want to exaggerate the contrast between the beginning of the story and the aftermath. The beginning of the performance is rich and full of flesh, we see skin, moving bodies, everything is alive. In the following plot, the world gradually empties, things gradually disappear, and the fiction, cover-up and lies of everything (in body, posture and space) slowly pass away, and finally become the naked truth.