Following his impressive Romeo + Juliet, the leading Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau returns to Opera Ballet Vlaanderen with a daring reinterpretation of The Sleeping Beauty. The age-old fairy tale becomes a disturbing allegory about our relationship with time. It is not the awakening but sleep itself that takes centre stage. What does the beauty dream about while she sleeps? What images, fears and desires inhabit that dream world?

Marcos Morau reimagines the fairy tale as a turbulent, almost frenzied procession of enigmatic figures, driven by extreme physical intensity and breathtaking imagery. Contemporary composer Juan Cristóbal Saavedra enriches Tchaikovsky’s romantic ballet composition from 1890 with electronic sounds. The radical The Sleeping Beauty thus becomes a sensory experience that balances between dream and reality and inevitably transports the audience to a world that is as poetic as it is unsettling.