As the culture becomes increasingly virtual so does the fairy tale. Where once it was gently dressed in the pillowy pastels of Disney animation, it is now a statement on steroids. At the movies, using digital technology to create nightmare visions that morph and mutate with stunning photographic realism, film directors have brought gothic horror and Tolkien-esque apocalypse into the bedtime fictions of yore. The intimate story structures in which the queen’s curse or the witch’s prophecy once dwelled—cozy, written “rooms” where sexual awakening and the family romance safely played out—have blown up into broad-canvas political or Promethean quests. There’s not much fairy in the tale.
Onstage, however, technology is still of the cranks and pulleys variety (though the cranks and pulleys are today computerized) and narrative still pours from human bodies. Strange to think that centuries before the invention of film, the stage was the place for grand and unearthly spectacle. Classical dance in particular was spinning out dreamscapes and visions—fires, oceans, earthquakes, spouting fountains, growing gardens, and The Great Beyond. The bill was footed by kings and czars. When the ballerina rose up on to pointe, which happened definitively in 1832 with the premiere of La Sylphide, the art form went astral, elevated forevermore to a uniquely metaphysical plane.
No one expects the fairy stories of dance to compete with the eye-popping imagery of recent movies like Snow White & the Huntsman—Hieronymus Bosch reflected in a black pearl—or a 3D cinematic
