Guilty pleasures:: Fairy tales at the National Ballet of Canada

Fairy tales are escapist by nature. We feed them to young children because they present simplified, if ominous, depictions of elemental conflict, with the assurance that evil will be overcome and good rewarded. We want our children to believe in a world as it should be, not as we adults know it to be. But the adult uses of fairy tales are more complex and cynical. As they occur in the arts, and especially in the art of ballet, fairy tales exhibit a subtle and paradoxical form of escapism: not one in which we flee the real world for the comforts of fantasy, but rather one in which we celebrate, through apparent fantasy, the values we repudiate in our thinking, daily lives.