This version of the Cinderella ballet, using Sergei Prokofiev's Cinderella music and re-choreographed by Frederick Ashton, is a comic ballet. Ballet productions Plot outline Ashton's Cinderella is his own realised dream of a Petipa ballet and the ballet itself enacts the realisation of dreams, notably Cinderella's own. When we first see her she is a demi-caractere dancer dreaming of being a ballerina—that seems to be the balletic point of her solo with the broomstick in the kitchen—and it is as a ballerina that she magically enters the ballroom, stepping en pointe down the stairs and advancing in pas de bourree to the front of the stage. Back in the kitchen she recalls the slipper (or rather the pointe shoe) that she carries in her apron; the shoe is the clue to her dream and persuades her it was true. The Prince finds Cinderella, but in his arms she discovers her own identity as a ballerina and her dream of herself has been realised. Cinderella's mice design the gown. Origins There are many versions of the story of Cinderella (the earliest was written down in China in the 9th century) and it has been the basis for a long list of pantomimes, operas, and ballets. The earliest Cinderella ballet proper was by Duport in Vienna in 1813, although Drury Lane's Cinderella ten years earlier had a ballet divertissement of Loves and Graces introduced by Venus. London's first complete Cinderella ballet was seen in 1822, the year Paris first heard Rossini's opera La Cenerentola. Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, and Enrico Cecchetti choreographed Cinderella for the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in 1893 to the music of Baron Boris Fitinhof-Schell—it was in this splendid production that Pierina Legnani first performed in Russia her celebrated feat of 32 fouettes—but none of the choreography has survived. Adeline Genée first danced Cinderella at the Empire, Leicester Square, on Twelfth Night 1906, and 29 years later to the day Andrée Howard choreographed her one-act Cinderella (in which Frederick Ashton was the elegant Prince) for Rambert's Ballet Club at the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate. The score Sergei Prokofiev had begun composition on the score for Cinderella in 1941 but, because of the war and his opera War and Peace, the orchestration was not completed until 1944. The music was choreographed first for the Bolshoi Ballet by Rostislav Zakharov in 1945 and then for the Kirov Ballet by Konstantin Sergeyev