Coppélia
Choreography: Patrice Bart
Paris Opera Ballet
Palais Garnier, Paris
March 19, 2011

As goodbyes go, the Paris Opera Ballet’s current run of Coppélia is an unfortunate one. On March 30 Patrice Bart, who choreographed this version in 1996, will bow out after more than 50 years with the company, first as a star dancer and later as ballet-master-in-chief. Contrary to popular French belief, however, a distinguished in-house career does not a choreographer make, and Bart’s ill-fated attempt at updating this 19th-century classic hardly reflects his long-term contribution to the company.

The original Coppélia is pure light-hearted comedy, a genre now so out of fashion in Paris that Bart decided to go back to the macabre story on which the ballet was loosely based, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman. The result is a muddled new storyline, charmless rather than dark, with a void at its centre: the absence of Coppélia, the lifelike doll whom Frantz falls for, prompting the jealous Swanilda to explore the workshop of toymaker Coppélius. Without this key to the characters, the production freewheels like an automaton gone mad. Peasants pop up for a lugubrious mazurka in what looks like a drab urban setting; Swanilda and Frantz’s fights and pas de deux unfold perfunctorily, with no dramatic arc to support them. Even Coppélius’s mechanical dolls, neither charming nor menacing, are little more than a footnote. (…)

» Read the full review in the Financial Times

Nolwenn Daniel as Swanilda © Sébastien Mathé