 Alexandra Danilova and Freddie Franklin |  Allegra Kent bows with Balanchine |
The Sleepwalker role in Balanchine’s La Sonnambula is uncannily open to multiple readings and interpretations. What makes it especially unusual is that although the role is so clearly the spiritual component of the ballet, it can also take on very dark shadings. The music for the Sleepwalker/Poet pas is “Qui la voce” from I Puritani. When I saw Olga Peretyako sing this aria at the Met last year it made me think that maybe this Bellini opera had more in common with Balanchine’s ballet than the eponymous La Sonnambula. The aria is part of the soprano’s mad scene, and the way that Peretyako (clad in a wedding gown after being stood up by her betrothed) pulled dementedly at her white veil seemed unnerving in the vein of the Sleepwalker. The jilted bride of Puritani and the Sleepwalker are both pure, good figures—but there is also something a little off about them.
Alexandra Danilova, for whom the role was choreographed, says in her memoir Choura that, “[i]n an ordinary pas de deux, the woman is somehow engaged by the man, and she goes toward him. But I was going toward the moon. And that attracts the Poet, because he can’t make contact with this woman….[he] knows that she belongs to the moon.” This connects back to the aria, as the libretto translates to, “Oh return my hope or let me die/ Come, beloved, the moon is in the sky!” Allegra Kent, for whom the ballet was revived in 1960, has described the Sleepwalker as someone who cannot awaken from a nightmare—a state that she claims reflected her complicated personal life at the time in her compelling biography Once a Dancer. She also writes, smartly, that the role is
Alexandra Danilova, for whom the role was choreographed, says in her memoir Choura that, “[i]n an ordinary pas de deux, the woman is somehow engaged by the man, and she goes toward him. But I was going toward the moon. And that attracts the Poet, because he can’t make contact with this woman….[he] knows that she belongs to the moon.” This connects back to the aria, as the libretto translates to, “Oh return my hope or let me die/ Come, beloved, the moon is in the sky!” Allegra Kent, for whom the ballet was revived in 1960, has described the Sleepwalker as someone who cannot awaken from a nightmare—a state that she claims reflected her complicated personal life at the time in her compelling biography Once a Dancer. She also writes, smartly, that the role is
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