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I did find Farmer's designs for Aurora to be quite lovely, with soft and sculptured tutus that flared up subtly but very prettily whenever Aurora spun through some chainés. Even better, in Aurora's diagonal of repeated penchées in the Rose Adagio, her tutu behaved itself, never flipping upside down to give the Court a glimpse of her frilly, royal bum, as in too many other Beauties I've seen over the years. I suppose this can be laid as much to Cojucaru's good sense (and coaching?) as her tutu's construction by the fine costumiers of the Royal Ballet's costume shop.

After recovering from the disappointment of Farmer's bastardizations (they really wouldn't be so disconcerting if this production weren't billed as a "return" to the Messel production, um, except for the hideous Vision Scene corps costumes), I found an awful lot to like: Alina Cojucaru's sweet, generous and very musical Aurora, and Johan Kobborg's elegant Prince Florimund, of course, but also the look and feel of the Royal Ballet's style. I've read complaints that the Royal corps no longer has its historical homogeneity, but compared with the catch-as-catch-can training of ABT's corps, or the semi-anarchic individualism of New York City Ballet's, the Royal dancers seemed a model of coherent style. It's good to see such careful epaulement and upper-body placement, nicely presented feet, and consistency of phrasing. I didn't see much remaining of the Royal's former fondness for dry, Cecchetti correctness, just clean, well-formed dancing, with an attention to detail (placing the foot in just the right coup-de-pied position, for instance) which was far more admirable than stuffy. This consistency was never more apparent than in the bits where the corps girls would line up four and more abreast, almost like chorines. I loved watching their feet flick out to just the right dégagé, then snap smartly back to a similarly consistent passé. I also liked the smart tempi set by Valery Ovsyanikov; no sleep-walking here.

I won't go into much more detail about this production, as I'm sure most of my readers here are far more familiar with it than I am. (I will just mention how disappointed I was by Christopher Wheeldon's bland Garland Dance.) Let me cut to the chase: Cojucaru. What a delight she was, with so many pleasures to be gained from her dancing. In the first act she bounded onstage with the grace of a young gazelle, and a radiant happiness befitting her character's name. She started the Rose Adagio formally polite to her four princely suitors, but quickly blossomed into a delighted exuberance. When she was hoisted to one of the princes' shoulder, she truly looked to be on top of the world. As much as her acting glowed, her dancing dazzled. She's got a big, effortless jump which just seems to happen with no preparation and prodigious balances and turns, but it was the cumulative effect of many small details rendered with a casual perfection which completely won me over.
 

I was happy to see Cojucaru's toeshoes looking a bit more trim than in her ABT appearances a few years ago. Blessed with the most peasanty of peasant feet, she uses an extremely wide box, but here they were less wide and deep than the coffee cans which I recalled. Although she may not have the prettiest feet in the world, she uses them like a violinist would his bow. I suppose it's a cliché to talk about "rippling bourrees," but her first-act bourrees rippled and sang. Indeed, they were almost hypnotic: quick and light like all her footwork, yet not so weightless you couldn't see each foot arch and straighten with her fluttering, rapid shifts of weight, looking almost prehensile as she skimmed across the stage.

I liked her strong balances in the Rose Adagio, and the slow way she'd bring her hand down to each waiting prince, to let us know just how solidly she was anchored, although she didn't hold her final balances as long as I (and doubtless she) had hoped. She also stretched a couple of double pirouettes into ungainly triples, where she had to finish her last turn almost hopping around on a flat foot, although she did nail a few triples as well.

In the Vision Scene (so dimly lit I thought it was an underwater grotto), Cojucaru really hit her stride, especially in her solo. Here, as elsewhere, she used her extraordinary turnout and extension to create something astonishing where other dancers might be merely beautiful. As with her bourrees, her second-act solo was hypnotic, with her working legs folding magnificently in retiré after repeated battements into sky-high à la secondes, while her standing leg remained rock-solid and straight. With her strength and amplitude, she sculpts such phrases with a rare focus and clarity. As if she's found a way to ignore Newton's Third Law, her dancing is all action and no reaction.

Cojucaru turned her solo in the third act's grand pas de deux into a bit of a treatise on just how to position the working foot in retirés. I was entranced watching the free play of her working leg, her foot sliding to and from (and sometimes past) her knee, or the wonderful looseness in her hip as she would swing her leg from a position en avant to arabesque while moving through a perfectly turned out passé, with just the right flick of her foot from the front of the knee to the back. She's far from a mechanical (if flexible) automaton, though. There's that diagonal in her solo where she travels backwards upstage, stepping into a piqué with her left foot while flicking her right through a little low ronde de jambe with each step. On her next-to-last piqué, Cojucaru played a bit with the music, swinging her working leg into a waist-high battement while rolling backwards, ever so delicately, off balance on her standing foot. She had to make a big backwards step a failli to get back on balance and on the music, but the effect was charming and impetuous, showing a playful streak in both Cojucaru and her Aurora.

Kobborg is well-matching in height to the diminutive Cojucaru, and the two worked beautifully together in the pas de deux's adagio. Her deep backbend while holding his hand with her working leg raised high before her was particularly stunning, as were their explosively quick fish dives at the end of the adagio. I don't think I've ever seen them done so fearlessly and instantaneously. For his part, Kobborg was a picture of yearning elegance in his second-act, adagio solo, and was appropriately princely in the grand pas de deux, although not quite at Cojucaru's exalted level.
 

Marianela Nunez' was both clear in her mime and powerful in her dancing as the Lilac Fairy. What better way to drive the evil Carabosse over the edge than to kill her so perfectly with sweetness, as Nuñez did in the prologue? Nunez is a powerful and tightly centered dancer, as she showed in her solo in the prologue with its climactic grande fouettés into arabeques facing the infant Aurora's crib. After the rather haphazard and sketchily coached fairies of City Ballet's pocket-sized Beauty, seeing the Royal's fairies, with their carefully couched presentations, was like reading literature after dime-store novels. I particularly liked Mara Galeazzi's Fairy of the Woodland Glade, with her beautiful changes in epaulement as she swung her working leg from attitude front to back. I also noticed in watching Laura Morera's Fairy of the Golden Vine (the "Finger Fairy solo") that the often ungainly pas de chats across the stage while the fairy points ever-higher with her fingers (where so many City Ballet fairies come to grief) have been replaced with a more-forgiving series of little hops with the trailing leg in tendu.

In the Bluebird pas de deux, Sarah Lamb's Florine was both delicate and strong; she looked to be flying like a particularly sharp arrow. As Bluebird, Yohei Sasaki was graceful, with beautiful arms and upper-body deportment, although he might've jumped higher. As Florestan, Martin Harvey had a pretty line (as did just about all of the Royal dancers), but seemed a bit low-energy. His sisters, Belinda Hatley and Deirdre Chapman were similarly pretty and clean without making a stronger impression.

In the character roles, Elizabeth McGorian was both a regal and motherly queen, quite heartbreaking when begging for her daughter's life, and Christopher Saunders' king Florestan XXIV was a magisterial buck-passer, pointing the royal finger with full majesty at Alastair Marriott's hapless Catalabutte to show Carabosse who'd forgotten her invitation. Genesia Rosato was a glamorous and coldly enraged Carabosse, her grudging curtseys before excoriating McGorian quivering with evil energy like a snake coiling to strike.