Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty at Sadler's Wells

The world premiere of Matthew Bourne's re-imagining of the iconic ballet classic 'Sleeping Beauty'. The choreographer returns to the music of Tchaikovsky to complete the trio of the composer's ballet master-works that started in 1992 with 'Nutcracker' and most famously in 1995, with the hit 'Swan Lake'. Perrault's timeless fairytale, about a young girl cursed to sleep for 100 years, was turned into a legendary ballet by choreographer Marius Petipa in 1890. Bourne takes this as his starting point, setting the christening of Aurora, the story's heroine, in the year of the ballet's first performance: the height of the fin de siècle period when fairies, vampires and decadent opulence fed the gothic imagination.