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Coppelia
Coppelia
Scottish Ballet
Adapting the plot of the romantic ballet to a contemporary issue, Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright preserve the source story’s reflections on free-will and desire while addressing, through the character Dr Coppelius, the kind of power and philosophy expressed by the technocratic entrepreneurs that have made futurology both a fad and headline news.
In place of the source’s doll, this Coppelia is a computer intelligence, given animation through 3D printing and, more fantastically, a human consciousness. At the heart of the drama is the confrontation between Dr Coppelius and Swanhilda (now a journalist, reporting on his latest AI innovation): she argues for humanity, he questions reality itself. When her lover becomes obsessed with the machine, Swanhilda makes a further investigating, investing the automaton with her vitality and, ultimately, condemning Dr Coppelius to virtuality. Like the nineteenth century source, the ballet grapples with the conflict between the human and the machine, with Swanhilda demonstrating the superiority of the supposedly inferior flesh and the division between the puppet and the puppeteer safely re-established.
The production fluidly combines choreography, some neat scenic tricks, film and projection to conjure a Silicon Valley filled with scientists and under constant surveillance: the precision of the ensemble, following a movement vocabulary rooted in classic ballet but incorporating a more distorted, twisted contemporary edge, presents a spectacle that is mechanistic and impressive: when Swanhilde becomes the AI, the ensemble appear to be cloned from her body, as male and female alike imitate her style, movement and appearance. The pas de deux introduce a warm, erotic element, the rotating of a set within the set in the scenes between Coppelius and Swanhilde speaking of anxiety and disorientation. It is a remarkable modern vision of ballet, that remembers its foundations as it launches into an uncertain future of rigid order and inhuman desire.
Yet the themes are updated only to prove that the paranoia of the nineteenth century is echoed in the new millennium. Swanhilde may defeat Coppelius, but her lover is enchanted by hyper-reality: the inanimate – even if it is given life by human manipulation – can provoke desire as easily as the animate, and the unsteady emotional connection between the two is disrupted by the inorganic. Swanhilda champions humanity, but the production, itself a hybrid, questions how far the cyborg is removed from the purely organic.
Gareth K Vile
