Red alert
Giannandrea Poesio
Coppélia Royal Ballet Despite its immense popularity, the ballet Coppélia is not a favourite with some dance practitioners. ‘Beware of ballets with lots of red boots,’ the late Rudolf Nureyev often used to say, scoffing at the pseudo-Slavonic local colour that the work relies on. Indeed, Coppélia can be regarded as a pretty little thing, having been created along the lines of Offenbach’s operettas at the end of the French Second Empire. And yet it is its naive escapism that has secured its long-lasting success.
Created in 1870, a few months before the start of the Franco–Prussian war, the ballet has gone through a number of historically significant stagings. The current Royal Ballet version has an illustrious past. Staged by the company’s founder, Ninette de Valois, in 1954, this Coppélia allegedly comes from the Imperial Russian Ballet repertoire and, more exactly, from the choreographic efforts of Lev Ivanov (the creator of the two white scenes in Swan Lake) and Enrico Cecchetti, the great Italian dancer and pedagogue, who taught de Valois, among others.
Alas, a distinguished lineage is not always synonymous with success, for history and heritage can easily thwart the theatrical vibrancy of a work. Which is what I felt had happened on the nights I went. Much as I agree with reviving the past and respecting performance traditions, I cannot help but object to the way in which this past has been kept alive. Being a balletic operetta, Coppélia requires both sparkling dancing and superb acting. The latter can be either in the form of natural-looking reactions and participation in the plot and its twists, or, more frequently, in the form of ballet mime, the 19th-century gesture idiom used by dancers to express and convey actions, emotions and feelings.
The problem with ballet mime is that, according to the great pedagogues of the past, each conventional movement needs to be performed with interpretative freedom and never mechanically — something the 20th-century ballet reformer Mikhail Fokine also insisted on. In the two performances I saw, though, the ever-so important narrative gestures looked extremely contrived, and were performed with little theatrical understanding. Even a natural-born actress/ballerina such as Marianela Nuñez looked unusually and unexpectedly at odds with these movements. Not to mention the fact that whoever reproduced these gestures seems to have paid little care to their meaning and, more significantly, to their narrative function. How Swanilda could see her fiancé Frantz throw kisses to another girl while she had her back to him remains a theatrical mystery. Similarly, it is a nonsense dramaturgically to have the Burgmaster describe the mysterious Dr Coppélius in the first act with mime gestures indicating a ‘doll-maker’, for such a description spoils the discovery of the life-sized dolls in the following act. According to Enrico Cecchetti himself, the Burgmaster should not perform doll-making gestures but rather movements referring to some unidentified mechanical activity.
The sole exception to this rather disastrous approach to balletic acting was William Tuckett as Coppélius, arguably one of the best interpreters of the role I have seen in more than 30 years of balletgoing. Unfortunately, other members of the cast did not seem to have a clue.
The dancing, too, suffered, on both nights, from a lack of stylistic accuracy, particularly in the numerous folklore-like moments in the first act. It would not do any harm to make the Royal Ballet artists revisit how a mazurka and a czardas ought to be danced. The blame, though, should not be put entirely on the interpreters and those who have restaged this version. The production, as a whole, looks terribly dated; as such it does not provide a theatrically stimulating context for the artists. Although the interior of Coppélius’s workshop has aged gracefully and maintains some of the magic of the illustrations from an old fairytale book, the village square, with its twee, naive motifs, is showing its years unmercifully. So are the costumes, originally designed, like the sets, by Osbert Lancaster.
Both performances I attended suffered from sluggish, almost funereal, tempi. Last time I commented on this problem, I was promptly (though privately) rebuked by a musician who insisted it was all the dancers’ fault. So I will not make too much of the disappointing performance of the orchestra. It is true that dancers today indulge in too much adjusting of musical speeds to their advantage. Still, such adjustments do not justify the fairly unimpressive musical rendition of a muchbeloved score I had to sit through twice in the same week.
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