In the twentieth century there was a strong anti-narrative trend in some quarters of the ballet world: storytelling was seen as corny. Consequently, a great deal of the mime, or hand-talk, in the nineteenth-century ballets was dropped. According to Alexei Ratmansky, this was definitely the case with “The Sleeping Beauty.” In the movement score he found much more mime than we see in today’s productions, and he says he restored every scrap of it.