Brandsen's Coppelia

Standard YouTube Licence

Dutch National Ballet Coppelia, Music Theatre, Amsterdam 11 Dec 2016, 14:00

With Mata Hari Ted Brandsen showed he was a master of tragedy (see Brandsen's Masterpiece 14 Feb 2016). With Coppelia he shows his mastery of comedy. I can't remember when I last laughed so much in a ballet or left a theatre more elated.  It is without question the best dance show around this Christmas. While I recommend the three Nutcrackers or Hansel and Gretel from our four leading companies, Sir Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes and Northern Ballet's Beauty and the Beast, if there is only time or money for one ballet this Christmas, this is the one to see.  Though I had a horrendous journey from Amsterdam last night thanks to a lorry running into an aeroplane, easyJet's appalling customer service, immigration officers forcing us to use their useless and annoying e-passport machines when we eventually landed at Ringway and a 2 hour wait for a train home, the pleasure I got from that show more than made up for it.

I am usually pretty scathing about updates of well-loved ballets as readers of this blog well know. I don't like bikes on stage in Swan Lake.  I bristle at shillelagh-wielding wilis. As I said in Manchester City Ballet's Coppelia 10 Dec 2016, Coppelia already addresses contemporary themes like coming to terms with artificial intelligence, low-level youth crime and elder abuse so why update it? With all these thoughts in mind, I was a little apprehensive as I entered the Music Theatre auditorium yesterday afternoon.  I need not have been. Brandsen had made some changes to the story and he had set the scene int the present, but those changes were changes for a reason rather than change for change sake.

Brandsen has changed the names of the lead characters from Franz and Swanhilde to Frans and Zwaantje. He has given them jobs in a gym and a juice bar respectively.  He has turned Dr Coppelius into a businessman with a chain of beauty clinics. He has introduced a lot of new characters including a demonic PA to Dr Coppelius called Anna Marx, a girl geek friend for Zwaantje called Emma, lots of relations, celebrities and two adorable dogs danced by children. On the other hand, he has retired Dawn, Prayer and Work as well as the duke and Burgermeister, He has given the last act a new sub-plot with Coppelia turning up in a wedding dress forcing Frans to choose between her and Zwaantje.  Probably the best way to appreciate those changes is to watch the animation even though it is in Dutch. In all other respects, Brandsen has left the story unchanged and he has kept the score in its entirety.

Yesterday, the role of Zwaantje was danced by Anna Ol and Frans by Artur Shesterikov. Both are consummate virtuosos. Ol thrilled us with her fouettés, posés and chaînés. Shesterikov with his soaring and seemingly effortless leaps.  They are also accomplished actors. Shesterikov held his head in his hands when he knew that Zwaantje had caught him making advances to Coppelia, a gesture known to every single woman in the audience who has caught her man doing something that he ought not to be doing and eliciting a ripple of knowing female laughter. More laughter from the audience as she dodged his embraces until she forgave him. Clearly too quickly because Frans allowed himself to be enticed into the clinic by Dr Coppelius and his assistant.

In Brandsen's version, Dr Coppelius was a major role which was danced yesterday by the soloist, Edo Wijnen. He was no eccentric old alchemist pottering about in his workshop but a powerful and unscrupulous businessman. He was energetic and guileful and very sinister. His assistant in his scheming was Weng Ting Guan who was as scary as her boss. It was she who produced a bottle laced with a drug that knocked Frans out cold. She wired him up to a machine which was to extract whatever it was that made him human and inject it into Coppelia.

Coppelia was danced by Nancy Burer whom I had first noticed when she danced Embers with Thomas van Damme on the opening night of the Junior Company's 2015 tour (see The Dutch National Ballet Junior Company's best Performance yet 8 Feb 2015). She had rather more to do in Brandsen's Coppelia than in most other productions who simply require their doll to sit and look beautiful and, occasionally, make short, jerky arm and leg movements. Brandsen made her into a seductress and a rather dangerous one. I think I saw more than a little of Mata Hari in Burer's depiction of Coppelia, resplendent in her strawberry blonde bouffant wig. There is, incidentally, a very amusing little video of Coppelia playing hide and seek with the security guard on the company's YouTube channel called Coppelia v The Night Watch with some lovely views of the Stopera or Music Theatre.

Van Damme, incidentally, also had a character role as a "glam rock star" or one of the dolls in the numbered boxes in the clinic. It was good to see him and other young dancers I follow such as Cristiano Principato, Emilie Tassinari, Giovanni Princic, Melissa Chapski and many others. There were opportunities for lots of fine young dancers such as Ahmad Joudah who danced the clergymen and indeed the students from the National Ballet Academy two of whom, Aafka Wolles and Wisse Scheele, danced the poodle and dalmatian. The final scene of the ballet with each of the characters taking a farewell bow the corps turning and the children doing balances brought each and every member audience (me included) to their feet. Standing ovations, which used to be rare when I first started watching ballet in the 1960s, have become increasingly common. More and more frequently I have to ask myself: "why?"  I didn't yesterday.  It was obvious. The audience's accolade  was well and truly earned by everyone in the cast.

I should say a word for the creatives. Sieb Posthuma's set designs were exquisite. In addition to theatre design he had been an illustrator of children's books and the intention was to create the illusion of walking into a story book.  Copies of that book were on sale in the foyer for just over 15 euros. I thought long and hard about buying a copy for Vlad the Lad but there was a lot of text in Dutch. The poor little boy is already expected to master his mother's Krio and his dad's Ga as well as major modern European languages and possibly the classics. François-Noël Cherpin did a magnificent job with the costumes. And who should be conducting the orchestra but our own dear Koen Kessels.

Anna Ol and Artur Shesterikov

(c) 2016 Jane Lambert
All rights reserved

After the show, Ol and Shesterikov sat at a desk at the top of the stairs and signed programmes and merchandise for a lot of excited little boys and girls and their equally excited Mums and Dads. Signing after a matinee is a charming practice of the Dutch National Ballet which I wish dance companies in this country would follow. It would do more to bounce kids into regular exercise than anything else I know.

Like most of my compatriots who follow ballet, my home is Covent Garden. There is nothing quite like the House on a ballet night. But, increasingly, I am finding a welcoming second home in the Dutch National Ballet's Music Theatre and I am beginning to know and love the Dutch National Ballet as I do the Royal Ballet.

Three Days in Amsterdam

Cristiano Principato with the author

(c) 2016 Gita Mistry: all rights reserved
Reproduced by kind permission of the copyright owner

Although the opening night gala for the Dutch National Ballet was my main reason for coming to Amsterdam (see Dutch National Ballet's Opening Night Gala - Improving on Excellence 8 Sept 2016) it was not the only thing that I did there.

Immediately after the show there was a party at the Stopera where I met some of the outstanding young dancers I featured in Meet Ernst Meisner and his talented young dancers 6 Dec 2014). Many of them have been inducted into the main company while others have joined the Stuttgart and Hungarian and Norwegian national ballets.  One of the most promising is Cristiano Principato from Novara in Northern Italy who is making his mark as a choreographer as well as a dancer. Also, he has already demonstrated his potential as an artistic director by staging the Gala for Alessia in June which I covered in From Italy with Love on 1 July 2016. Two of his works were performed in that show including Palagio which the Dutch National Ballet danced in its New Moves programme.

Eight of Cristiano's colleagues from the Junior Company appeared in Night Fall which is described as the first virtual reality ballet in the world. They included Lisanne Kottenhagen and Emilie Tassinari whom I featured in 2014 as well as Nancy Burer whose performance in Embers I described as one of the most beautiful that I had ever seen in The Dutch National Ballet Junior Company's best Performance yet 8 Feb 2015 and Priscylla Gallo, Clara Superfine, Melissa Chapski, Hannah Williams and Belle Beasley whom I saw in Ballet Bubbles on 14 Feb 2016. Each and every one of those young dancers is special and I cherish them dearly.  In Night Fall, those eight young dancers supported the magnificent Anna Tsygankova who had danced Cinderella brilliantly at the Coliseum last year (see Wheeldon's Cinderella 13 July 2015) and Artur Shesterikov who received the Alexandra Radius prize at the gala.

I had tried to follow the instructions on the How Can I Watch the Night Fall page of the Dutch National Ballet's website but did not get very far (see Looking forward to the Gala and trying to get the Night Fall Video to work 31 Aug 2016). In response to that blog post the company advised my companion and me to try the Virtual Reality cinema next to Amsterdam Central Station which we did. Had I seen Night Fall on the stage I would have loved it. As a ballet it could not be faulted. However, as a technology, virtual reality still has a way to go.

The VR Cinema turned out not to be a cinema at all in the conventional sense but a bar with some side rooms equipped with a number of revolving chairs to which vizor like goggles and headsets were attached. Patrons were invited to don those items and relax in the chairs. As I had to remove my headset several times I noticed the heads of my fellow patrons lolling around like babies and gyrating in their chairs like dynamos. We were behind a plate glass picture window in full view of the public. No doubt a source of considerably amusement to the neighbourhood.

We were charged 12.50 euros each for a choice of films each of which lasted about 30 minutes. Drinks were expensive too and the cinema would only take cards for payment. I chose "Documentaries" which featured polar bears in the Arctic, a French artist who made a massive tableau of a chap with a John Cleese style silly walk and a trendy couple in he media making excuses to a fake TV crew for not taking care of a Syrian refugee after they had gone on record as saying that the migration crisis was everybody's problem and not just the authorities'. I had all sorts of problems with my goggles. First, they took a long time to start. When they did start they offered me the "Scary" programme and not "Documentaries" which I had ordered. Half way through the show the film cut out altogether. When it restarted the picture was so blurred that I could not recognize any of the dancers even though I know them all very well. Altogether, a bit of a swizz.

Having said that I do think there is a place for VR in ballet which I shall probably discuss in another blog post and there are better technologies.  While waiting for me to finish my video, my colleague was invited to try the goggles of a VR equipment supplier. She found the quality of that company's product (which happened to be British) to be greatly superior.

One of the delights of Amsterdam are the free lunch time concerts that are given in the small auditorium of the Concertgebouw most Wednesdays.  We were treated to a programme of Ravel, Piazzolla and Milhaud by the Colori Ensemble on 7 Sept. My favourite was Piazzolla's Verano porteno which was a percussion solo by Arjan Jongsma.  Tickets are distributed at 11:30 on a first come first served basis and there was already a bit of a queue by 10:40 when we arrived.  The auditorium can hold about 440 persons.

We did a lot in those three days without getting round to the Rijksmuseum or indeed any of the other art galleries. There is so much to see in Amsterdam and the Night Watch should still be there the next time we call.