Coppélia – EIF 2022 Review

Scottish Ballet’s Sci-Fi Coppélia is precisely the sort of show that will attract new audiences into the ballet

📍Festival Theatre
📅 Aug 14 – 16
🕖 7:30pm/2:30pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 1 hour 15 minutes
🎥 Direction & Choreography: Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright
✍️ Dramaturgy and Written Text: Jeff James
🎵 Music: Léo Delibes, Mikael Karlsson and Michael P. Atkinson
🔨 Set and Lighting Designer Bengt Gomér
🎞️ Projection and Video Designer Will Duke
🪡 Costume Designer: Annemarie Woods
💰 £21
🎂 Age undefined: parent’s discretion
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet, Audio Enhancement, Assistance Dogs Welcome

It’s Coppélia, but reimagined for an age which anticipates the coming of true Artificial Intelligence by means of science, and not magic. Dr Coppélius (Bruno Micchiardi) in re-imagineers Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright’s rendition, is a Silicon Valley disruptor, dressed in Steve Job’s black. Swanhilda (Constance Devernay Laurence) no child, but an investigative journalist, has come to his ‘NuLife’ institute to report on the new Coppélia A.I. software, and the bold inventor’s attempt to migrate this tech into a robotic body. As working reporters often do, Swanhilda has brought with her fiancé Franz (Simon Schilgen) to keep her company.

For those familiar with the original ballet, most of the major beats are there, plus a few more thanks to a synthesizer (and more) enhanced, and re-worked score. To this techno-opera soundtrack, Swanhilda will delve deep behind the NuLife curtain, finding a company drunk on power, and perceived self-importance. When brought face to face with the Coppélia A.I. trapped in the machine, she discovers that she can succeed where Coppélius presently stumbles: she can bring the A.I. into the material world, via her own body. Meanwhile Coppélius has conceived his own means to embody his beloved technology, and it involves Franz.

This is a dark, techno-story told in shades of Blade Runner, the electronic augmentations to the as ever wonderful Scottish Ballet Orchestra invoking an ominous touch of Vangelis, amidst a swarm of pulsing beats.

Turning then to the storyboarding, direction, and of course, the quality of dance, devotees of Scottish Ballet will be unsurprised at their continued excellence. There’s far more modern dance here, shaded with hip hop & popping highly suitable to such a mechanically themed story. Fortunately, the entire company prove not only equal to a departure from classical forms, but to delight in them. Devernay Laurence, the hero of the piece certainly rums the gamut of genres, as she moves from humanity to artificial lifeform and back again. The choreography is bold, often treating the company more like dancer in a music video, entirely apt to such a hybrid show, which fuses live recording (cameraman: Rimbaud Patron), pre-recorded on-set sequences, video magic trickery, and voice-over.

Video Designer Will Duke has clearly worked well with ‘Jess and Morgs’, the transitions from stage, through doorways into cinematic big screen action, seamless. There’s a great deal of quality about the entire show, not least on the part of Set and Lighting Designer Bengt Gomér who makes the entire space-age stage a projection screen through ingenious means. It brings to mind Hyemi Shin’s space-station triumph in The Lyceum’s 2019 Solaris. There’s also a natty ‘space within a space’ wheeled out on demand to furnish the play with Coppélia’s office, and an unquiet bedroom for the two heroes. Here is where the live filming comes into its own, the big screen camera feed relaying finer, more subtle, up close and personal movement.

Such hybrid ballet invites different comparisons from usual, and in this case the ever-ingenious Rambert seem the apt comparators. Their Aisha and Abhaya earlier this year, was less ambitious in connecting filmed sequences with the on-stage, but no single trick was exploited to a wearying point. By contrast the initially impressive device by which Devernay Laurence discovers she can ‘enter the machine’, becomes tired after most of the company have replicated the action. Like any magic trick, the audience knows it’s being fooled, but it wants the magician to sell it. Prepared to watch the transition from human to digital image, the audience can’t miss the minute disconnects, nor the stream of dancers calmly walking off stage once processed.

That said, this moden Coppélia is a well-paced sequence of arresting scenes, and mesmerising choreographies. A particular stand-out involves a small group of the corps embodying robotic experiments, some brandishing additional limbs to create a truly inhuman constellation. The quality of the dance, and interactions with a remote-controlling Swanhilda, defies expectations by making them objects of wonder, even pity. It’s magical stuff. The entire production is also precisely the sort of show that will attract new audiences into the ballet, there to be impressed, and given a gateway into the diverse entertainments it offers.

An innovative, bold, & beautiful adventure in sci-fi ballet…more please!

(Image Credit: Scottish Ballet)