Girls Who Dance Like That

Arlene Croce begins The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book by describing a moment early in the 1937 musical Shall We Dance, when Astaire’s character has fallen in love with Rogers merely by watching a moving flip-book image of her dancing: “He’s not just a man who has fallen in love with a picture of girl, he’s a man who has fallen in love with a girl who dances like that.” Astaire’s line—“I haven’t even met her, but I’d kinda like to marry her”—sets the romantic plot in motion, sticking with conventions of both romantic comedies and musicals while sneakily updating fairy tales, and fairy-tale ballets, in which the handsome prince enjoys a mystical vision of the woman fated for him. Such moments symbolize how the physical beauty of a body in motion, sculpted by technical skill, produces the illusion of erotic enchantment we so often experience when watching dancers.

Story ballets and dance-driven musicals must make us believe in love-at-first-step. The dance that reveals one partner to another, or the first number they perform together, has to deliver in dance terms the knocked-for-a-loop sensation Shakespeare conveys through Orlando’s stunned silences before Rosalind, or Olivia’s carnal awakening at her first interview with Viola.

American Ballet Theatre has marked its seventy-fifth anniversary with Alexei Ratmansky’s gorgeous new production of The Sleeping Beauty, which opened May 29 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House (its world premiere came in California in March). The Act 2 vision scene develops the erotic potential of these two lovers who have not yet met, a courtship without consummation. The Lilac Fairy (Stella Abrera in the opening-night cast) mimes to Prince Désiré (Marcello Gomes) the story of enchanted Princess Aurora (Gillian Murphy), who suddenly appears to him, dancing with her attendants. Then, magically, the vision becomes interactive: three times Désiré lifts Aurora horizontally, as if awakening her to flight, but she then coyly interposes the Lilac Fairy between them as her ladies restrain the prince from rejoining her. Yet she bourrées toward him and he supports her in adagio, then in a pirouette that spins into an arabesque. Their duet concludes with her balancing on pointe in unsupported arabesque for several seconds, fanning his ardor with her balletic skill.

Their physical contact may seem absurd in this, a fantasy sequence, but it actually underscores one peculiar paradox of ballet, intense physicality exerted in service to the illusion of ethereality. It therefore emphasizes how dance engages us by conflating real bodies with imagined feelings. It also makes it easier to swallow events in the plot that violate our understanding of psychology and sexual politics. My students, reading Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale, bristle at the princess’s passivity (she doesn’t even have a name), at the idea that the prince falls in love with an inanimate woman, and at her immediately returning his love upon awakening. The ballet actually presents these developments in a plausible if not entirely logical way. Désiré falls in love not with a sleeping princess, but with a dancing one, partly dissipating the troubling aroma of necrophilia. He becomes enamored of neither a legend nor a comatose female, but a girl who dances like that. Their dancing together in the vision scene, with Désiré offering support for Aurora’s technical virtuosity, presents an embryonic courtship, establishing their compatibility—they dance well together—and love. His waking her, then, marks a kind of reunion: in a sense they already know each other, evoking a beautiful frisson of déjà vu. And in reconstructing, as far as possible, Marius Petipa’s original 1890 Mariinsky Theatre production, Ratmansky’s Beauty eliminates the charge of female passivity by cutting the high-leaping, fast-whirling solos for Désiré added by later choreographers—his restored variations demonstrate care, precision, and intelligence rather than macho bravado—and focusing the ballet on Aurora’s dancing.

Ratmansky and his wife, Tatiana (who plays the elegant Queen, in an absurdly towering...