Diana Vishneva, Mariinsky Ballet

The Mariinsky Ballet returned to the Kennedy Center Opera House on Tuesday night for a run of performances of its classic production of The Sleeping Beauty. Classic can also be a nice way of saying tired, and this choreography by Marius Petipa, updated by Konstantine Sergeyev and Fedor Lopukhov, has the advantage of being a fairy-tale, wedding-cake piece of fluff and the disadvantage of the same. The company from St. Petersburg, which has apparently taken the final step toward shedding its Soviet past by dropping its former name of Kirov Ballet, is not willing quite yet to break with its past when its comes to the sacred cows (the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s music and Petipa’s choreography were given by the Mariinsky Theater in 1890). Whether you think that is good or bad depends on your tastes.

To be honest, it is hard to imagine anything but a saccharine staging for this sugary libretto: Charles Perrault‘s hard-hitting fairy tale re-imagined by Ivan Vsevolozhsky and Petipa with an entire third act devoted only to the wedding of Princess Aurora and Prince Désiré. The good news is that the dancing was beautiful to watch, especially from the women of the corps de ballet, which looked much more unified and rigorously rehearsed than they did in Don Quixote last year. All of the big group numbers had an aesthetically pleasing evenness of movement and gesture, which is important in a ballet where a meagerness of storyline means that not much is left to simple pantomime.

Prima ballerina Diana Vishneva, starring only on Tuesday night, was just as striking and athletic in the demanding role of Aurora as she was last year as Kitri (it is inspiring to recall that she has risen to stardom in spite of childhood health challenges). Always smiling, demure but with physical strength, she was graceful and long-legged in her extensions, perfectly balanced of head and shoulders, seemingly frozen into arcing position in her pirouettes, and floated above the stage en pointe.