Moscow Festival Ballet
The Sleeping Beauty

The Sleeping Beauty, a crowning jewel in the career of choreographer Marius Petipa, is often called the finest achievement of classical ballet. The three-act ballet, which premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1890, moves to a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and takes inspiration from a well-known fairy tale by Charles Perrault. An evil fairy condemns a baby princess to prick her finger and die on her sixteenth birthday. But the Lilac Fairy saves the child by declaring the injury will merely put the princess to sleep until awakened by a prince’s kiss. The Sleeping Beauty is replete with a king and a queen, good and bad fairies, a beautiful princess and a dreamy prince, magical stage effects, courtly splendor, and a storybook kingdom from the realm of the imagination. Moscow Festival Ballet, created in 1989 by Bolshoi Ballet principal dancer Sergei Radchenko, recruits leading dancers from throughout Russia. The company, with Radchenko as artistic director, has toured extensively in Europe and the Far East. This tour of The Sleeping Beauty marks the troupe’s seventh visit to the United States. The company performed Swan Lake at Eisenhower in 2014.