Attitudes.

When Ninette de Valois, the formidable founder of Britain's Royal Ballet, started her company back in 1931 she sensibly realized that first of all she needed a repertoire for her young dancers. Although a choreographer of only modest talent herself, she fairly soon acquired a genius choreographer from her rival Marie Rambert, in the person of Frederick Ashton. But new works, she felt, were not the complete solution. She needed a classic repertoire. De Valois had been with the Diaghilev company, and she soon took Michel Fokine's Les Sylphides and Carnaval from that repertoire. But the really clever thing she did was to adopt the orphaned Tchaikovsky/Petipa ballets from St. Petersburg's Maryinsky Ballet. These she obtained from Petipa's last regisseur, Nicholas Sergeyev, who had left Russia with a whole set of choreographic notations packed in a large trunk.

Thus on February 2, 1939, at the Sadler's Wells Theater, De Valois's company, then known as the Vic-Wells Ballet, presented The Sleeping Beauty for the first time. It had decidedly dowdy designs by Nadia Benois and was called The Sleeping Princess, following the precedent set in 1921 by the Diaghilev company, for which Sergeyev had first produced the full-evening ballet in London. Later that same year--just before the outbreak of World War II--the Vic-Wells Ballet made its first appearance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, giving The Sleeping Princess at a gala in honor of the president of the French Republic.

During the war years (more or less freed from any balletic opposition) the Vic-Wells Ballet, now called the Sadler's Wells Ballet, achieved virtually the status of a national ballet, and it was almost a foregone conclusion that when Covent Garden was reopened after the war, the Sadler's Wells Ballet would move in as its constituent ballet company. The old Opera House had been used as a dance hall during the war, and now refurbished and as glamorized as post-war austerity would pen-nit, on February 20, 1946, it raised its curtain on a Royal Gala, presenting (with its proper name restored and a few minor changes) The Sleeping Beauty, with gorgeous new settings and costumes by Oliver Messel. This lavish production became the company's signature work and its calling card to the world. In 1947 Sol Hurok saw it and, wily old impresario that he was, instantly recognized its commercial potential. Thus on October 9, 1949, it opened the Sadler's Wells Ballet's first New York season.

Until that season the full-evening ballet was anything but established in the United States. Admittedly, as early as 1937 Catherine Littlefield had staged a version of The Sleeping Beauty, with her own choreography; Giselle and even Coppelia (neither in those days a full-evening ballet) were generally known, and George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova had staged a multi-act version of Raymonda, also not a full evening, for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1946. So the idea of one ballet comprising an entire program was then revolutionary.

Something new and lasting had occurred in American dance. In 1962 New York City Ballet produced a full-evening Midsummer Night's Dream, followed three years later by Don Quixote, and by 1967 American Ballet Theatre had staged its own Swan Lake. The shape, look, and size of American ballet had changed, and Sadler's Wells's Sleeping Beauty had inaugurated the change.

The production of The Sleeping Beauty as staged by Nicholas Sergeyev, from his notebooks of Stepanov notation, was apparently the authentic 1890 original, or at least the Petipa version extant in St. Petersburg when Sergeyev decamped in 1918. This was confirmed in 1999 when Makharbek Vaziev, after many years of wholesale tinkering during the Soviet years, restored the original for the Kirov Ballet, using Sergeyev's notebooks (now in the Harvard Theatre Collection) and anecdotal memories of old dancers and teachers. Other productions, all stemming from that 1946 Covent Garden staging, included various subsequent ones by The Royal Ballet (the title granted Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1956) and those by Ben Stevenson, Kenneth MacMillan, and Peter Martins.

Last year, quite disastrously, The Royal Ballet, then under the brief directorship of Ross Stretton, commissioned Natalia Makarova to stage a wholesale recension of the ballet, based on her memories of the old Soviet version staged by Konstantin Sergeyev (no relation to Nicholas), with a few additions of her own. The result, first given on March 8 of this year, was a provincial choreographic mishmash of the kind one would expect to find in a small German opera house rather than with The Royal Ballet. The real pity is that The Royal Ballet has, temporarily at least, surrendered its birthright and Petipa's creation.

My friend Clement Crisp, an apologist for Makarova in the Covent Garden program book, suggests that "the 'original' 1890 text and design did not take fully into account those inevitable developments in training and technique that have supervened after a century." Say you so, Sir? And should we start making changes in old Balanchine and Ashton ballets--many of them already half a century old? Is the choreography of a ballet no more important than the mise-en-scene of a play or opera? I believe not. I do believe that The Royal Ballet will come to its senses. Meanwhile, we have the versions of the Kirov and, ironically, even American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet to admire and cherish.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.