Natalia Makarova: No slave to tradition

What can a dazzling former star of the Kirov bring to the Royal Ballet's Sleeping Beauty? Natalia Makarova tells Nadine Meisner how she plans to rouse this dormant production

The Royal Opera House's new home gleams with such technological luxuriousness, it's probably a living organism, hiding a powerful mind ready to pounce on unsuspecting, vulnerable individuals. Take what happened to Natalia – Natasha – Makarova the other evening. She found herself locked in her dressing room because she failed to press a release button on the wall. Poor, fragile Natasha, trapped in the jaws of some evil labyrinth the size of a town, to be found only 100 years later: she might have become a real-life version of the drama that she is currently mounting on the ROH stage.

It's an overwhelming task, she says; and although I'm not hugely enamoured of her Bayadère (already in the Royal Ballet repertoire) any attempt to wake up The Sleeping Beauty will come as a relief, replacing the company's present, repeatedly lambasted, wrong-headed version. When the then director Ross Stretton approached her, she hesitated nervously, but decided it was too good an opportunity to miss. The Sleeping Beauty is a mammoth undertaking, not only because of its sheer scale, but also because it is Marius Petipa's greatest ballet – or perhaps the greatest ballet of all, a close collaboration between Petipa and Tchaikovsky that achieved the grandest perfection of form and feeling. "The ballet is like an allegory of spring, of rebirth," she says. "It is also about the confrontation between evil and goodness. The moral is that goodness can push away evil and that love conquers all. So The Sleeping Beauty will never die or seem old-fashioned because that is a moral for every epoch."

She should know, given that her roots lie in the Kirov Ballet, where Petipa created The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, and that she first performed in it as a page when she was just 14. Later, she danced a fairy, the White Cat, Princess Florine to the Bluebird of the tragic virtuoso Yuri Soloviev, and finally Aurora. Even after 32 years in the West, as the second Kirov star after Nureyev to seek asylum, we must still be a disappointment to her: insensitive to high art, ignorant about tradition, concerned only with product and financial return. The fact that the ROH insists she keeps this lavishly leisurely ballet down to a maximum three hours, to avoid paying costly overtime, says it all (although she makes no complaint about it).

Makarova, 62, has been instilling a distinctive Russian touch to the technique of The Sleeping Beauty: the graceful rococo curlicues of arms and neck that echo the ballet's Louis XVI Frenchness. "They resist, but we are getting there," she says about the Royal Ballet. "The company is very eclectic, with dancers from different cultural and professional backgrounds. I have to unite them in one style and it takes time – how to give a movement value, how to make the eyes, the hands, the arms, act in harmony, according to the classical rules. I have to inject this into their bodies." She must come as a shock to some of the company. She brings rigorous Russian hard work and the analytical approach developed by the teacher Agrippina Vaganova that has produced such outstanding dancers. "Listen to the music and everything is there," she tells them: "The majestic way of presenting yourself, the radiance which Aurora must possess, it's all there, plus poetry."

She shuffles through sheets of paper on which she has written down the answers to my questions, but gives up and puts them down. She had asked to see my questions in advance: a request that had sounded prima donna-ish, but which turned out to be prompted simply by a self-consciousness about her slightly fractured English and a conscientiousness to get her answers right. Equally, she continues, she doesn't want to be a slave to tradition. "Choreography is not like the other arts because you are dealing with human bodies. Dancers of each generation bring their own experience to the steps. So you cannot pin down tradition like a butterfly, it's based on each past generation and it's actually evolution." She is not convinced by the Kirov Ballet's recreation a few years back of the original The Sleeping Beauty – "it's mainly of archaeological, not artistic, interest and anyway its authenticity is very questionable." She believes that The Sleeping Beauty requires tweaking. "This ballet needs fresh air, to take some dust away and give it new life. I think that the best way is to be true to the spirit of Tchaikovsky and Petipa, to respect their intentions; but aesthetically it has to work for our times."

Her version will be based on the Konstantin Sergeyev production (itself incorporating many revisions) that was one of the pillows of the Kirov repertoire, and also on what she has learnt in the west. She insists she has not radically cut the mime, only trimmed unnecessary gestures that don't say anything; she wants the dancers to perform it with naturalness and conviction, which isn't easy, given that ballet mime is becoming a lost art. She has had to make some cuts to other areas and has speeded up the transition between scenes, which she feels helps to maintain what she calls the story's cantilena. The lightweight gauzes that form the basis of Louisa Spinatelli's decor contribute to the speed and, although Watteau and Gustave Doré have been influences, the general look will emphasise the story's fairy-tale dimension.

What else do you ask a living legend, famed for her own cantilena of movement, adulated for her Giselle, in particular, and her Odette-Odile, but not so much her Aurora? On stage she always danced spaciously, her proportions creating slender, stretched lines. Yet in person she is the size of a child, still skinny in her black leather trousers. These days, when she's not mounting productions (she recently did Paquita for the San Francisco Ballet), she goes for the occasional acting role and appeared in Blithe Spirit in Watford two years ago. Does she miss dancing? "I don't miss the suffering. Dance is very physically hard and it was a constant struggle with technique, perhaps because I was such a perfectionist." But she misses the transcendence of actual performance. "The sensation of moving with the music, it was a spiritual freedom." She used to suffer terrible stage fright. "The nerves, my God, with the years it just got worse. But on stage, once through this barrier it was fine. I just gave myself to the moment." Now, though, she suffers decorously. "When I see my dancers, well, I'm even more nervous."

'The Sleeping Beauty', Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) 8 March to 21 April