The Rose Adage

It’s perhaps the most famous moment of The Sleeping Beauty, the one balletomanes wait for and watch intently, the one that makes the audience erupt. At her 16th birthday party, Princess Aurora dances with four princes who have travelled from distant lands to compete for her hand. Each one offers her a rose. At the end of this picturesque dance, the ballerina balances on one toe while each prince takes her hand and guides her in a circle. Between princes, she raises her arms up above her head and balances on her own in an extraordinary feat of strength and composure that originated with the English ballerina Margot Fonteyn.

Two of our principal artists, Robyn Hendricks and Benedicte Bemet, join our Principal Repetiteur, Kirsty Martin, to explore how they’ve handled the moment both mentally and physically.

Ready to be Steady 

Nerves can make you shaky, which doesn’t mix well with sustained balances. Hendricks notes that the Rose Adage is “daunting—because everybody knows it, and there is all this footage of amazing ballerinas doing it. It can be quite suffocating if you put all that expectation on yourself; it can actually destroy you mentally! You have to realise that there is a reason you’re doing this role and be confident in your talent and artistry. It’s easier said than done—but you find your own way. But having said that, it’s completely terrifying! Whenever I hear the music that comes before it, even if years and years have passed, I feel those nerves all over again.”

Martin has been dancing Aurora’s variations since she was 15, coached by legendary dancer of The Australian Ballet, Christine Walsh, who danced the lead in The Sleeping Beauty on the company’s international tour in the 1980s. “When I coach the Auroras, I tell them to reach back to that time in your life, perhaps when you were dancing your first big role, when you were young and fearless and had all the inspiration and ambition in the world.

“Sometimes standing there and not doing much can be a vulnerable space for dancers, it’s actually very hard. It’s all about elegance, poise, and energy in your body. The way you incline your head, the way you look at your prince, the way you articulate your foot as you step onto pointe, the way you place your arms in fifth position, the way you feel your waist hover up and over your tutu—there’s so much detail. You have to create magic, you have to be this ethereal creature.”

Bemet says that a focus on the story helps. “Before the technical feat, you have to 100% know what your character is. If you’re constantly worrying about the steps and the choreography, that doesn’t help. You need to be ‘I am this young girl, I get to dance with all these princes, I’m so lucky! They’re all so lovely!’ And then at the end you’re like, Oh, I’ve been working on this trick …”

Getting Rose-Fit

The Rose Adage, Martin says, “requires a lot of structure, a foundational sort of placement and strength in the body. Aurora looks so pretty and delicate, but the role requires so much strength and endurance, and there’s a particular way that you hold your body. Your central energy comes from the way you step up onto pointe and the way you hold yourself—you can’t just ‘sit’ in your shoe, you have to constantly reacquaint yourself with the strength of your metatarsals and the way that feeds all the way up to the top of your head.”

Hendricks prepares for those challenging holds by hitting the gym. “I have very bendy ankles and feet, so I have to really work on ankle stability and my foot and calf strength. There is a lot of time in the gym working on proprioception and lower-leg strength. And I spend hours in the studio, holding onto a barre any chance I get. By the end of the Rose Adage, you can’t feel your leg, your feet are cramping, and your calf is so tired and just dropping out; it’s such a mind game. You have to rely on the strength you’ve built up, and there’s a lot of mental talk.”

Bemet also grabs some barre time in the weeks leading up to her performance. “The preparation takes a lot of quiet moments, just standing on your leg, holding onto the barre, feeling all the muscles on the supporting leg, what needs to be on, and what needs to be off. Then going into the actual position and finding a zone, or one single thought that puts you in the right place. If you’ve got too many things going on in your mind, like ‘Backwards! Forwards! Sideways!’ that’s not going to work. For me it was one word, ‘plumline’. It helped me to visualise dropping into the ground from the head.”

Some dancers like to darn a circle around the tip of their pointe shoe, giving them a wider platform and a touch more stability. The balances are tough on shoes, and some dancers will discard their first pair after Act I. Martin preferred to keep the same pair for the whole ballet. “Even if they were a bit dead, I liked the continuity, it was sort of a psychological thing.”