Sleeping Beauty
Solo.
Premiere: 1993, European Dance Development Center, Arnhem, Holland.
A violinist dreams that he is performing the grandiose ballet music for The Sleeping Beauty. An entertainer mimes to a fragment of a song by the Mexican singer Javier Solis. A horse is shot and falls to the ground, but dreams that it gallops away. Towards the end these images amass into one, and accompanied by more ballet music, the dance changes between the three characters.
Concept, choreography and dance: Anders Christiansen
Music: Tchaikovsky
Lighting: Lars Egegaard Sørensen
Minimum stage measurements: 8 x 8 metres
Duration: 17 minutes
Press quotes:
"Surprising - and not just because a young male soloist is a rarity, was Anders Christiansen who danced Sleeping Beauty. In sheepskin coat, long brown boots, bare knees and with a violin under his chin, he mimed his way quietly and dreamily through the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty, which swelled from the loudspeakers. He made serious fun at the sensitivity, and yet became sensitive, touching and awkward. A shy dreamer, a clown in an athletic body, who in the Vision Scene, one of the other big breathtaking numbers from 'The Sleeping Beauty' - became another being, straight after to sneer at the poetry and play a horse which falls over."
Erik Aschengreen (Berlingske Tidende, 6th June 1994)
"A lovely fragrant vision, which however develops into a galloping nightmare of barking dogs, shooting, and mechanical horses falling over, and shot down princely hopes. With a tightly controlled minimalism, Anders Christiansen lives through the whole grim fairytale. Poetically captured, hilarious, touching - and heartrendingly tragic - just like that!"
Majbrit Hjelmsbo (Teater Et, September 1994)
"All of it is about the mortification of the flesh. About the body's questionable, but unavoidable substance and the quest for transformation. Here it seems to be the underlying theme of redemption in dance - in ballet - and the resurrection of the flesh, which Anders Christiansen tries to penetrate.
In Sleeping Beauty the great redemption dream with underlying Tchaikovskiesque pathos is exposed by the sawing violin player with bare legs in riding boots. A selected reverent on the spot, where tripping ballet bravura slides together with hammering Spanish heels and the galloping hooves of the horse that is repeatedly gunned down and resurrected. One hardly reaches, liberatingly enough, a sense of coherence before it has already galloped by."
Monna Dithmer (Politiken, 26th June 1995)
"We had the opportunity to revisit Anders Christiansen's Sleeping Beauty, from 1993. And the repeat only confirmed that Tchaikovsky's violinist in overcoat and underpants is a master of taking the piss out, in the most innocent way, of all the obvious solutions there may be in such a solo. A Sgt. Pepper of the dance."
Janus Kodal (Ekstra Bladet, November 1997)
Venues:
Singler 97 / Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, 21-22 November 1997.
Kaleidoskop, Copenhagen, 21-24 June 1995 (solo programme Transgressor).
X-pos 1 / New Now Dancing Space, 2 June 1994.
European Dance Development Center, Arnhem, Holland, 1993.
Photographs: Peter Lind
In all pictures: Anders Christiansen
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