National Ballet of Japan (live stream), 02/05/2021
Delibes : Coppélia
Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra
Misato Tomita
The National Ballet of Japan had been hoping to stage performances of Coppélia in front of an audience at this point in time, but with the government declaring a state of emergency in the Tokyo region (as well as elsewhere) due to a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases - and with the Summer Olympics just around the corner - these had to be cancelled. However, the company has gone ahead with four matinee performances, all with difference casts, which have been put up on-line for the greater pleasure of an even wider audience.
The company uses Roland Petit's 1975 version of Delibes's ballet, which, although it adheres in the main to the familiar outline, also offers significant differences. Most notably, these lie in Dr. Coppélius's role, which Petit created for himself to dance. As a result, it's a much more active dancing role than in the standard version. He also reduced the ballet to two acts and three scenes, the usual third act shrunk to an abbreviated pas de deux for Swanilda and Franz, and the final Galop, and the Waltz of the Hours moved into Coppélius's workshop as a dance for the inventor and his doll. Instead of the traditional 18th (or early 19th) Century Central European village, we're in a garrison town at the end of the 19th Century, with the male corps all soldiers. The result is that the characteristic dances - the Mazurka and Czardas, notably - are less distinctly marked than usual, while the Galop at the end has definite overtones of the can-can, and there's a great deal of very Gallic shoulder-shrugging and -rolling.
The relationship between Swanilda and Franz looks rather more like that worn-out trope of American high-school movies, where the most popular cheerleader automatically dates the school's star football player. Although there is a wedding at the end, it's really not at all certain that they are actually engaged at the start, and Franz is not remotely subtle about his interest in Coppélia. As for the doctor himself, he's a somewhat younger man than usual, a dapper figure with a dandified air - think Anton Walbrook - and it's certainly not a daughter he's looking for in his doll, but a companion, not to mention that he has something of a crush on Swanilda and has crafted the doll in her image. Petit could project the bathos of the role like no one else, in almost every other dancer's hands, he comes across as rather louche, and Shunya Nakajima, for all his stylish charisma, does not escape that pitfall.
Yui Yunezawa and Shun Izawa were the young couple, both neat, fresh dancers, Yunezawa very comfortable with the pert vocabulary of her part, and the over-the-shoulder glances, while Izawa had the easy arrogance required for Franz. I can't say either of them took your breath away, but they were well-matched, expert and convincing. The corps de ballet was crisp and lively, particularly the men who exhibited an appropriately military precision in the Czardas. The whole was very ably supported by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, under the sympathetic baton of Misato Tomita.