TORONTO - It's not so much a case of dancing with the one who brung you but dancing the dance that brung you.

More than 30 years after the legendary Rudolf Nureyev created The Sleeping Beauty for the National Ballet of Canada, a work which was to thrust the company to the centre of the world stage, the ballet remains a treasured part of the NBOC repertoire -- and so does the memory of the man who created it.

So it was fitting, in its way, that it was Nureyev's Sleeping Beauty that was chosen to awaken the romance as the company kicked off it's winter season Saturday on the stage of the Hummingbird Centre with a joint tribute to St. Valentine and to the late Russian dancer/choreographer who died a decade ago. Modelled by Nureyev after the work of Marius Petipa and re-staged here with passion, precision and great affection by Karen Kain, the work remains a brilliant showcase, not just for the romantic pair at the heart of the story, but for an entire company that seems to relish a magnificent opportunity to strut its stuff in the grandest of balletic traditions.

Stripped of some of the more egregious examples of wig-making run amok, even designer Nicholas Georgiadis' opulent designs seem to have acquired an antiquarian patina that is often, although not always, charming.

In Saturday's opening performance, Greta Hodgkinson danced a near flawless Princess Aurora to a technically strong Prince Florimund, essayed by Marcelo Gomez, guesting from the American Ballet Theatre.

In what are extremely demanding roles, both dancers proved more than equal to the physical challenges of Nureyev's choreography, although both would be well advised to devote as much attention to the why of their character's dance as the how, informing performance with a frisson of passion, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, that would render it into the love story it was meant to be.

Still Nureyev gave us much more than a simple love story to savour in the creation of this work. In fact, he strung together breathtaking dance sequences as if they were so many magnificent pearls. It's a work that affords us the opportunity to treasure quality work from individual dancers such as Keiichi Hirano and Stacey Shiori Minagawa (as Bluebird and Princess Florine), Je-an Salas and Daisuke Ohno (as the Pussycats), Lise-Marie Jourdain (as the Lilac Fairy) and the perennial Victoria Bertram (as Carabosse), even while we marvel at a corps de ballet operating at the very peak of precision and passion.

The Sleeping Beauty may be three decades old, but as long as the National Ballet of Canada approaches it with this kind of potent mix of enthusiasm and respect, it will be a long time before they can even consider putting it to bed.

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