words stephanie wu

As the classic cautionary tale against playing god, the story of Frankenstein’s monster reveals the danger of creating a being whose violent compulsions wreck havoc on human life. In contrast, the story of Coppélia – HK Ballet’s August production – replaces the monster character with Coppélia, a beautiful doll-girl, whose artificial perfection doesn’t place anyone in immediate danger, but rather, works as a mirror to reflect the foibles of humanity’s own compulsions with power, creation and love.

As Coppélia’s choreographer Ronald Hynd notes, the ballet’s messages can be just as pressing and significant as the horror of Frankenstein. “In comedy, there’s always truth. Comedy is the folly of mankind – self-delusion, deluding others and getting caught out – that’s he glory of it, the getting caught out,” says choreographer Ronald Hynd, contemplating the story of Dr. Coppélius, a doll maker obsessed with bringing his creation to life, and of the young Franz, who foolishly leaves his real-life love to pursue a mechanical doll. Though the ballet is a much lighter adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story, Der Sandmann – which involves murder, madness and suicide – Hynd claims he has tried to bring some of the darker themes back to the show.

When pressed for examples of what the show reveals about human nature, of mankind’s ‘delusion’, Hynd immediately jumps to the second act, where Swanilda – Franz’s old lover – dances as Coppélia to win back her love while Coppélius traps Franz in an attempt to take the boy’s life and give it to his doll. “[Coppélius] has a slight moment of danger in the second act, when he expresses his will to transfer the life from one person into a mechanical person. It’s a brief moment, and it’s one of the moments of strong drama – very brief, but I try to make that telling,” he says.

One method by which Hynd draws out Coppélius’s dark side is to contrast it with the amorous, caring character of Swanilda. Hynd reveals Swanilda’s emotions through dance, tracing her progress from a cold and calculating deceiver to a sympathetic human being in her in cognito performance as Coppélia. “Initially, when she takes the pace of the doll, she’s behaving in a very mechanical way, until she sees her love lying drugged on a bed. She keeps her tense at first, but then she breaks down because she wants to waken her love and get him out of this weird place,” Hynd describes. In an obvious undercutting of Franz’s infatuation with the stiff Coppélia, Swanilda must break from the doll’s mould to express her love.

Yet Hynd is careful to qualify his plot analysis with the assertion that first and foremost, “my particular slant on a comic ballet is to make it amusing. You can read into it what you like. I’m not making any particular statements, I’m just making a ballet.” Accordingly, Hynd has both emphasized the use of balletic acting – such as pantomime, comedic timing, and exaggerated facial expression – commonly used in past performances, and added his own visual embellishments in order to set his version apart from past productions.

One example is Hynd’s heightening of the show’s technical standards. “I’ve slightly re-choreographed some of the dances. The original version handed down is very charming, but I felt I could add some more technical challenges for the dancers. People do more pirouettes today, people have more brilliant footwork,” he says, describing the development of ballet choreography as an evolutionary process, in which dancers constantly aim to surpass their predecessors and build on past innovations.

Another instance of Hynd’s original innovation is the machine Dr. Coppélius uses to bring the doll to life. This stage contraption departs stylistically from former productions in which “they just used to make vague gestures in the direction of the doll. I’ve actually got her linked up to a machine,” says Hynd, who constructed the machine as a variation on 19th century steam engines and incorporated the electromagnetic technology of that era into the design of the machine.

Besides the addition of the machine and complexity of the technical movement, however, Hynd claims he’s tried to stay loyal to the 1874 French production of the ballet, choreographed by Marius Petipa with original music by composer Léo Delibes – except, of course, that unlike in 1870, the leading male role will be danced by a man, not a woman. This lack of pressure to alter the ballet comes from Hynd’s confidence in the intrinsic, ahistorical empathy of the characters, as he explains by offering these final words on the plot: “There’s no prince and no princess in it. It’s peasants, it’s a boy and a girl in a village, and there are no overly romantic tones to it. It’s just a simple romance – no swan, no sleeping beauty. It’s life. And I think that’s why it’s really always been successful, because people can identify with the very simple, charming story.”

Coppélia will be performed at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Grand Theatre on August 22 to 24. Shows start at 7:30pm nightly, with 2:30pm matinees on the August 23 and 24. Ticket prices range from $1000 to $160 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.