Joyous or Creepy? This Ballet Toys With Both.
Celebratory choreography meets a voyeuristic doll tale and creepy visuals in this stylistic mashup. Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Coppélia runs through June 9.
For digital season subscribers, the streaming version is available June 13-17.
Unbelievable.
I cannot tell the difference between a real man and a rubber one from 50 feet away?
I’m losin’ my touch.
— Regine Hunter (Living Single)
Even if we ignore the fact that the doofuses of Coppélia apparently can’t tell the difference between a real woman and a wind-up one, and from a mere inches away, there’s still some undeniable weirdness going on in this ballet.
Much of it is inherent in the plot, which finds philandering-hopeful Franz (James Kirby Rogers in the opening night cast I saw) leering at an unknown, stone-still “woman” whose figure beckons him from a balcony. In fact, the object of Franz’s affection — other than his fiancée standby Swanilda, that is — is an elaborate life-size, wind-up doll created by reclusive toymaker Dr. Coppelius (James Yoichi Moore on opening night; PNB School professional division student Clara Kang-Crosby played the impressively rigid and robotic doll). Coppelius has dubbed this doll an offshoot of himself (hence “Coppélia”), dotes upon her and, when he’s not giving her pageant-style appearances waving robotically from the balcony, hoards her away on a curtained-off dais in his private toy loft-slash-dungeon.
Keenly aware of Franz’s wandering eye, Swanilda (Leta Biasucci on opening night) sneaks in, swaps outfits with the doll, and pretends to be the wind-up figure. Now she’s the object of both the creepy toymaker and the looky-loo fiancé’s affections. Gross.
But the production’s design plays all this up in a way that, paradoxically, leaves the inherent creepiness feeling more camp than human — and here that’s a good thing. That brings to mind a largely neutralized swirl of creepster pop-culture references: the tight fist of hyper-controlling Dr. Finkelstein over a longs-to-be-free Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas; a 2015 indie flick, called Zoom, about an artist who works at a sex doll factory; the rather self-explanatorily titled Demonic Toys, an early-‘90s flick; and touches of generic creepy harlequins and scary clowns. (Thankfully, these clownlike dolls are way less real than the clowns in the imagery for Seattle Opera’s upcoming season-opener, Pagliacci. And props to the ICP commenter on the Opera’s trailer video, who clearly understands the assignment.)
The campy-creepy flair, found mostly in the toy shop scenes of Act II, livens up what otherwise follows a pretty standard story-ballet flow: weird gleeful villagers’ ensemble dance; love/hate duo and interloper(s) who all pantomime a lot; celebratory series of random dances tacked onto the end.
There’s a lot going on in Act III’s familiar buffet of celebratory dances. The leading duo follows up their de rigueur pas de deux with a surprise onslaught of solos in rotating rep. Melisa Guilliams’ showy Spinner provides a great contrast with Elizabeth Murphy’s understated technical prowess (as an ethereal Prayer). Ashton Edwards effortlessly lights up the stage; but is it because you can see their smile from the roof or because they definitely-probably can high-kick themself in the head? There’s an army of cute be-tutu’d kids in formation. A battle scene that’s in dire need of a Rat King. And the PNB Orchestra carrying the whole Balanchine-Danilova-Petipa procession along, with the catchy tunes by 19th-century French composer Léo Delibes.
As with most PNB shows, the primary cast members rotate with each performance. Opening night’s showing benefited from the endlessly expressive Leta Biasucci (as Swanilda-turned-Coppélia), alongside near-final PNB performances of two departing principal dancers: the retiring James Yoichi Moore (whose career the upcoming Season Encore will celebrate) and James Kirby Rogers (departing for Dresden’s Semperoper Ballet, in Germany, at season’s end). But another standout is a much less familiar face: PNB School professional division student Lucas Galvan, whose magnificent hops as the Acrobat Doll had me totally convinced that PNB’s resident human pogo stick, the gravity-defying Kuu Sakuragi, was hiding under all that face paint.
Equally parts showy-dance precision and creepy-camp factor, PNB’s Coppélia lands in a playful space in between: familiar enough for story ballet fans, and weird enough for the rest of us.
*
Coppélia choreographed by Alexandra Danilova and George Balanchine (after Marius Petipa); music by Léo Delibes; book by Charles Nuitter (after E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann). A co-production with San Francisco Ballet. Staged by Judith Fugate and Garielle Whittle; scenic and costume design by Roberta Guidi di Bagno; lighting design by Randall G. Chiarelli.
Coppélia runs through 6/9 at Pacific Northwest Ballet (in McCaw Hall, Seattle Center/Mercer side). Tickets ($42-$217) here. Pay-what-you-choose same-day rush tickets are offered for the Thursday night performance (6/6); see info here. Accessibility notes: main restrooms are gendered and multi-stall, with gender-neutral, single-stall restrooms available by most of them. Theatre and common areas are wheelchair accessible.
Run time: 2 hours 15 minutes with two intermissions
Chase D. Anderson is Editor & Producer of NWTheatre.org.