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James Moore and Mara Vinson dance Le ballet de la Paille

Last week, the delightful and deceptively deep Coppélia opened at Pacific Northwest Ballet as a co-production with the San Francisco Ballet. The original ballet premiered over a century ago in 1870, but contemporary productions use choreography by George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova for a 1974 staging. For this production, PNB commissioned Roberta Guidi di Bagno to create all new sets and costumes, which brought new life to this classic story—the original Guys and Dolls.

The inspiration for the story of Coppélia was a deeply macabre tale from the Nachtstücke of E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose work also inspired The Nutcracker. In truth, there is little resemblance between Hoffman’s work and Coppélia. Both stories have an inventor obsessed with creating life and a female automaton whose vacuous charms steal the heart of a young man. However, whereas Hoffmann’s tale is full of death and insanity and centers around a man obsessed with a perfectly submissive female, Coppélia’s lighthearted and comic narrative belongs to the lovely and courageous heroine, Swanilda. This might disappoint those who prefer something a little more dark and philosophical, but Coppélia is not just a pretty, trifling music box of dancing dolls. If anything, it is all too human.

The ballet has its contrivances, certainly, from its idyllic rusticity to its hodge-podge of folk dances to its storybook ending. It is a fairy tale, and like all the best fairy tales, its glittering surface dazzles the senses while belying a darker side. Enclosed beneath a thickly woven canopy of wisteria, the little Galician hamlet where the story unfolds seems to be but an enormous cabinet of Delftware, built of pristine porcelain with cobalt flourishes. In celebration of the new bells to be unveiled the following day, the happy townsfolk dance a gay Mazurka. Eight couples spin with the precision of clockwork, twirling like gears within a breath of each other. There is slapstick as Swanilda’s love interest, the strapping Franz, callously pins to his own breast a live butterfly which he has caught with her, and later when he teases and flusters Coppelius with his cohorts. There is comedy as the lovers lurk and clash, and Franz nearly swoons for a kiss from the Coppelius’ mysterious “daughter.” Swanilda’s sorrow and uncertainty at his caprices are conveyed in the sentimental Ballet de la Paille. The girls dance with an ear of wheat in hand in hopes of hearing a whisper from it, which would affirm that they are beloved of their courtiers, according to superstition. All of this in the first act, which sets the stage for the central and chiefly important second act. However, beyond merely advancing character and plot, there are subtle connections to the larger theme contained in Act I, particularly regarding The Wheat Dance.

Throughout Europe—nay, the world—the staple crop or food source of a land took on such importance that, virtually without exception, it became associated with a local god. Because the people understood that their very being, their physical existence depended upon this staple food, they were intimately connected to the crops and it was commonly understood that the crops were an embodiment of the god. In old agrarian societies, the harvest was a time of great jubilation, but also melancholy and it occasioned a need to appease the god whom they were in essence destroying to feed themselves. By appeasing the god, they could better ensure that he would return the following year. Thus, our ancestors saw themselves as beings of the earth who still had a touch of the divine fertility god within them as this divinity resided in every grain. Many of the early European fertility gods were depicted as beautiful young men, such as Attis and Adonis, and were beloved of fertility goddesses who ensured that they would be reborn every year. Thus, to this day there is a deep connection between the fertile harvest and divine love. The townsfolk live a life close to the earth, deeply aware of the flesh and blood nature of their bodies as being supported by the harvest, the cycle of rebirth and death and love.

How stark a contrast to Dr Coppelius! Surrounded by these yokels, the mad genius remains a sympathetic character to modern audiences who are just as likely to see themselves in him as in the protagonists. Desperately alone, incapable of relating to those around him, what choice does the inventive Prometheus have but to create his own companions, and ultimately his own love? We sympathize to a point, but Coppelius eventually goes too far, when in the second act he drugs Franz and attempts through occult practices to extract his vitality to animate Coppelia, who has already stolen the heart of the oblivious youth. Unbeknownst to Coppelius, Swanilda has disguised herself as Coppelia after becoming trapped in his workshop. As Coppelius channels the vitality from Franz’s limbs and trunk—and finally his heart—into Swanilda, she plays along and becomes increasingly animated and “human” with each infusion, at last coming alive.

It is interesting that the moment Coppelius believes that his work has come to life, he hands her a mirror. This process becomes a subtle commentary on what it means to be human, quite advanced for its time—wildly prophetic for Hoffmann’s time. The lifeless doll, the Freudian Uncanny, first achieves animation, then feeling, but its autonomy is actualized when it is allowed self-recognition. Swanilda doesn’t miss a beat, and immediately demonstrates volition distinct of her “creator’s” will. To his dismay, she fawns over Franz—still comatose on Coppelius’ throne of tomes—and runs about the room stirring up Coppelius’ simpler, harlequin creations: a juggler, an acrobat, an astronomer and an Asian soothsayer. Each manikin is designed for a singular purpose, perhaps serving as surrogates for the agility and acuity that the decrepit doctor knows that he is certain to lose entirely as an aging creature of flesh and blood. The search for love, for immortality, for the novelty of invention—these are what animate Coppelius. But he is tragically flawed in his belief that love can be invented or that he can control what he has created. Such figures as he loom large in the public mind to this day. Frankenstein, Faust, countless other lonely and misguided intellectuals since have represented the all-too-human search for power and control rather than understanding and love. Following the recent advent of the first fully synthetic organism created by man, increasingly complex AI and robotics and the questions that arise from such advances, these conflicts remain at the core of the modern experience.

Once past these dilemmas and the twilight realm between life and the lifeless, issues of identity begin to creep up. The second act touches on this as well, though perhaps not intentionally. (Perhaps I am seeing more than is there; just call me Franz.) It is common for a choreographer to include an assortment of folk dances, and one can sometimes sense that the decision as to how to introduce the dance is rather arbitrary. In Coppélia the choreographers rather ingeniously have Swanilda dance a Bolero, then a Scottish Jig as Coppelius dresses her in a mantilla and tartan sash, respectively. His dolls first seem alive to him because they can move, but his perfected and reactive doll can go further. Not confined to the singular role and movement he has given it, this doll can swap identities based on how he chooses to attire it. By changing the appearance, one changes the reality. This backwards logic is also quite prevalent in our culture of images, and if the choreographers did not intend this in their work, it exists there now, all the same.

After the performance, I spoke with PNB Principal Dancer and founder of Whim W’him, Olivier Wevers. The ever-insightful choreographer remarked that in our time Coppélia is ripe for a more macabre, gritty production, closer to the tone of the original story. I absolutely agree, and I think that the work could extend easily into an interesting examination of the meaning of dance and its power. In a culture where people often seem embarrassed to have bodies at all, there is a certain willful ignorance of the body, or at least a lack of consciousness about it, and this tendency may be one reason why public interest in the ballet has dwindled in recent decades. Many, I daresay, would rather be a doll than flesh and blood, and so the rigor and beauty of ballet is lost on much of the audience. Still, to take the story into this neighboring territory, a drastic change to the music as well as the dancing would be required, for the third act is typical Balanchine: a wedding full of stunning solos and celebration—as well as a corybantic war dance—culminating in a tender pas de deux. Coppelius makes only the slightest cameo as he carries his lifeless doll in hysterics, and is casually given a bag of money by the mayor as restitution for the mischief of the townsfolk. The practice of Wergeld extends to manikins as much as men, it seems. Lovers are united, the madman is pacified, the bells ring, and they all live happily ever after. After such a profound second act, the third act feels shallow, like following a robust wine with a saccharine soda. Still, it effervesces with the presence of a fluttering fleet of child ballerinas and the beautiful costumes and sets newly envisioned and designed by Roberta Guidi di Bagno—who, I must add, looked stunning in her own satiny, pearl-grey ensemble. Though the third act might seem jejune thematically, it is ultimately an affirmation of human joy, a wide spectrum of emotion, and the capacity for love that makes us human. In this light, the third act works just fine.

The suggestion that the themes of this ballet could be portrayed with greater depth and power in a different context is poignant and exciting, but, like the broken Coppelia that Coppelius carries in Act III, the entire work will probably need to be rebuilt from scratch. It’s certainly worth considering. Perhaps Fritz Lang’s Metropolis could be the inspiration. In any case, until someone assumes that task, I am quite content with this Coppelia. However flawed and bloodless she might be in the end, I still see the heart of humanity in her. I say again, just call me Franz.