Review of the ballet “Coppelia” by Alexei Ratmansky at La Scala Theater

The first ballet of La Scala’s 2023/24 season – according to tradition in Milan, the season opens in December – was the world premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s Coppélia. Preserving the libretto, music and order of numbers of the ancient ballet, the choreographer composed the choreography anew. He talks about what happened when mixing French with Transcarpathian Tatiana Kuznetsova.

“Coppelia,” the dying ballet of the talented and prolific Frenchman Arthur Saint-Leon, composed by him to the score of Leo Delibes in 1870 for the Paris Opera, has a happy fate: it has not been forgotten; it has been staged in different countries for more than 150 years. At the same time, there are much fewer radical versions of “Coppelia” than the “great” classics: the well-tailored libretto of Saint-Leon and Louis Nuiterre is connected with the bright melodic music of Delibes so inextricably that all attempts to add infernality to the ballet (the source of the plot was Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” “) are crushed to dust. In 1870, the French made a cozy, entertaining ballet with simple intrigue: the young man Franz flirts with a mechanical doll, mistaking it for a girl; jealous bride Swanilda enters the house of her creator, Master Coppelius, and discovers that her rival is one of his mechanisms; In the third act, the heroes play a wedding. Saint-Leon was also fond of ethnography – it was he, working in Russia, who composed the ballet “The Little Humpbacked Horse,” in whose extensive diversion the nationalities that were part of the Russian Empire were represented. In Coppelia, the setting is Galicia, the eastern edge of the Austrian Habsburg Empire, and there are also many national dances there.

Coppelia was also lucky with classical dances: the ballet came to Russia in 1884 under Marius Petipa – and he gladly re-composed the choreography of his former boss Saint-Leon. Already in the twentieth century, Petipa himself was supplemented and edited, most successfully by Alexander Gorsky. In Soviet times, humorous ballet escaped disgrace and was performed even during World War II; many variations, pas de deux and ensembles were also preserved in ballet schools. And in post-Soviet Russia, “Coppelia” was reconstructed by the late Sergei Vikharev, our main passeist, and today in Moscow you can see the most authentic performance: Vikharev staged it in 2009 – the year when Alexei Ratmansky resigned as ballet artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater.

At La Scala, of course, Coppelia is not a stepchild either: the ballet was staged in Milan with commendable regularity from 1896 to 2009. And the choreographer Ratmansky is known and revered here: for La Scala he made reconstructions of great classics, original ballets, and transferred his finished productions. So the artistic director of the troupe, Manuel Legris, enthusiastically supported the choreographer’s idea to compose his own version of “Coppelia”. As Ratmansky himself admitted in an interview, the main motivation for him was the location of the action – a small town in Galicia. “The Boy from Kyiv” (as his recently published biography is titled) wanted to stage a ballet about a happy Ukraine, while leaving the era, classical dance, French music, the original libretto, the order of the numbers, the location of the scenery and most of the mise-en-scène intact. With such self-restraints, the artist came to the fore.

The Frenchman Jerome Kaplan, familiar to Russian audiences from the spectacular performances of Jean-Christophe Maillot and the charming appearance of Lost Illusions, once staged at the Bolshoi by Alexei Ratmansky, solved the problem of costumes with extraordinary ease. The juxtaposition of trousers, scrolls, embroidered Hutsul vests and graceful lace shirts, laced bodices and short skirts, common throughout the ballet world, looks like an ordinary ballet vampuka. The only things that make you shudder are Franz’s wedding gold trousers combined with an embroidered shirt and some “Hymen” in a tunic and Greek sandals, who appeared at a Carpathian rural holiday.

The choreography is an equally wild hybrid. But still, Ratmansky’s typical combination of true classics and signature gesture movements (such as the “snake” – a sequential change of turned and turned out feet – or high-speed trampoline-childish jumps) here looks intrusive and deliberate – perhaps because the choreographer has to compete in absentia with Petipa’s canonical text.

Ratmansky’s ballerinas and soloists seem to interrupt themselves mid-sentence, breaking up combinations with pauses or “passing” movements and not having time to demonstrate their feminine virtues – rotation, step, even jump: it’s not so easy with an insidious garguiad, scrolling through one the foot is two ronda en dehors, and the other is two en dedans. The men (especially Franz) compete even more actively: double rondas in jumps, entrechat-six at an entrechat-quatre pace, springboard turquoises in the air, countless turns and pirouettes. And along the way – pantomime picks, friendly fights and typical ballet humor such as “pancakes” in arabesque, which became the emblem of the jeep, and then given to the groom’s friends, or languidly taking out a leg in a la seconde with a translation into arabesque and tilting the body, which is usually done by Giselle in the second act, and here – “Hymen” in its languid variation to the music of “Prayer”.

Some of Ratmansky’s finds are witty – like the batterie skids during a jump, there are stupid ones – like the one when Swanilda, lifting up her skirt, shows her butt to her imaginary rival, there are dubious ones – like the finale of “The Dance of the Hours”, in which the bride and groom lie on their backs among the female corps de ballet, with their hands folded like a dead woman, sort of like “they lived happily and died on the same day.” And there are hopeless ones – all of them relate to the characteristic dance, the knowledge of which, acquired at the Moscow School, Ratmansky resolutely refuses to apply. Thus, in the whirlwind mazurka he has no pas gala at all; Instead of the main Polish step, the villagers, holding the villagers feet first in a horizontal position, run with them like with guns, and this attack is repeated many times throughout the dance. “The Hungarians” are also denied their emblematic step – a proud step with a leisurely turn of the leg: in Ratmansky, village women in boots and fluffy skirts raise their legs to the heavens and throw their heads back to the floor, getting stuck in this position for a long time with the caring support of men. However, in the Ukrainian pas de basque – jumps with high knees – the choreographer does not refuse either the “Hungarians” or the “Poles”, complementing this non-reversible movement with an emphatically reversible – galloping ambuate. If we add to these steps the can-can throwing of large batmans, which all the villagers amuse themselves, then the festival in Galicia is suspiciously reminiscent of the Parisian Folies Bergere.

The second serious problem of the choreographer, all the more surprising for such an experienced and musical author, is “short breathing,” that is, the inability to cope with a large musical form. And although Delibes here does not pose such serious tasks as, say, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexei Ratmansky was unable to cope with either the voluminous mazurka, or the “Dance of the Hours,” or even the pas de deux, dividing them into several small fragments and launching “outside” characters with their micro-replicas into the main dance. Particularly strange is the original variation of Swanilda, the first part of which is danced by Franz, the second by the heroine herself, and the third by children frolicking at their wedding.

The adult performers of the La Scala troupe also quickly master clichés unfamiliar to them, cheerfully kicking the ambuate, bending at the waist on “strings”, imitating wedding fights and managing to scratch their stubs at a fire pace. The aggressive, fussy, intensely grimacing Coppelius (Massimo dalla Mora) in a gray disheveled wig and for some reason in a leather coat, as if borrowed from a 1960s noir, overdid the facial part. Franz (Nicolo del Freo) easily mastered the national flavor, including “getting drunk” and folk knees – right down to squatting, without forgetting about the intelligibility of ronds and the purity of pirouettes (the prime minister still lacks a jump). Self-confident Swanilda (Alice Mariani) mimes with liveliness, is ready to demonstrate aplomb at any moment, is pure and stable in the adagio, and in the finale, at the behest of Ratmansky and to the delight of the audience, he dashingly spins 32 fouettés, with the last 16 in the form of a large pirouette, without forcing with the “working” leg, and stretching it to the side.

But no matter how the artists perform this “Coppelia,” it is unlikely to be long-lived: after all, dancing in ballet is more important than political relevance, and it was on the dance floor that Ratmansky was completely inferior to his classical predecessors – in logic, fantasy, coherence, and musicality. Which is not surprising: it is risky to stage with exemplary canonical choreography behind you. On the other hand, literature is full of Ukrainian subjects suitable for ballets. All you have to do is leaf through Gogol, select (or order) music – and you can, without fear of comparisons, compose some excellent “Terrible Vengeance.”