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The Breakdown

A Ballet Heroine, Step by Step

Who is Swanilda, the lead of “Coppélia”? Our critic demonstrates how her ebullient, game-changing character is shown in her steps.

Most heroines of 19th-century ballet are brilliantly active as dancers but dramatically passive. They dance and bloom while other people build up the story around them. Not so Swanilda in “Coppélia,” the three-act classic that returns to New York City Ballet repertory May 25 (through June 2).

She can see that her boyfriend, Franz, is flirting with the girl next door — but she, unlike him, has the good sense to be suspicious of that girl, Coppélia. Supposedly Coppélia, who never dances, is the daughter of the crazy scientist Dr. Coppélius — but isn’t she too good, too passive and too mechanical to be true? Leave it to Swanilda (here danced by the City Ballet principal Megan Fairchild) and her eight girlfriends to find out the truth!

“Coppélia,” though, is also a highly classical construction, and Swanilda’s ebullient, game-changing character (she turns the story around) is objectively shown in her music and her steps. The 1870 score — a marvel of melody, orchestration and brio — is by Léo Delibes; one of the passages in which it most marvelously marries lively characterization to formal perfection is the Slav theme and variations, in which Swanilda and her chums just dance. Nothing happens in terms of plot, but the steps tell you who they are.

And yet those steps — the choreography is widely attributed to Marius Petipa — are absolutely formal. Here we see that all nine young women keep reverting to fifth position, the crucial starting point in which one turned-out foot is placed in front of the other (one heel by the other toe, one toe by the other heel).

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For them, that’s always a launching pad.

As the music’s first variation starts, Swanilda arrives (as if pouncing) into fifth position, lingers there as if teasing the suspense — and then steps smartly out onto one point, arriving in the position known in ballet as arabesque, stretching a gestural line from one forward arm through the leg extended behind her.

The brisk footwork that follows tells you about her speed and pluck. But that arabesque also shows you her poise: grace under pressure.

Around 1940, the choreographer George Balanchine told the critic Edwin Denby that all his ballets were based on this dance for Swanilda and her friends. Well, we can see why. “Coppélia” shows the same closed-open contrast that abounds in Balanchine ballets, notably in “Concerto Barocco” (1941):

But Swanilda is an enchantress in her own right, not just because she’s proto-Balanchine. She is, as Denby observed, like the heroine of a play by George Bernard Shaw, taking matters into her own hands.

In Act I, the theme-and-variations format lasts just over seven minutes, taking Swanilda through a marvelous range of moods. In this solo, she’s at her most extroverted, perky, spirited.

Here she lingers silkily before switching to sparkle.

Watching the details of her dance helps you to fall in love with ballet footwork: This shows her energy, precision and composure.

This passage, in which she executes the same step (enveloppé, or grand battement raccourci) again and again, demonstrates her poise, her fluency, her amplitude.

And it’s not just the music that plays variations on a theme; the steps do, too. In this next part she’s switching again from fifth position to arabesque on point, but twice as fast and as explosively as before.

And here she makes that fifth position a girl-power rallying call: Do what I do! Her friends shadow her step for step; and the music is shot through with laughter and high spirits.

What happens after this in “Coppélia”? In a year when New York has had several variations on the Pygmalion legend, “Coppélia” adds a feminist twist. As Swanilda and her friends find in Act II, Coppélia really is a doll — Dr. Coppélius has Pygmalion-type dreams of bringing her to life. So Swanilda, donning Coppélia’s clothes, fools him. Impersonating his doll daughter, she heartlessly fulfills his hopes: In her, he thinks he sees his artifact coming to life.

Next, laughingly, she shatters this house of cards twice over. She shows the lifeless Coppélia to both Coppélius and to Franz. So, Franz learns what a fool he’s been. Coppélia, the perfect woman he was pursuing, was a mechanical toy. Swanilda, whom he was double-timing, is made of flesh, blood and wit.

Reader, she gets what she wants: She marries him. Then, in her wedding pas de deux, she goes further, showing us one more variation on the stuff of which she’s made. She becomes a ballerina: grander, more mature and more multifaceted than before. But it’s the Act I theme and variations that show you her potential.

The standard devices of the traditional ballets can read as so many clichés. In multiple ballets, for example, those companions surround their heroes and heroines with dancing entourages: The heroine often has six or eight female companions known as “little friends.” But don’t knock them! Those companions take the heroine’s feminine spirit and fill the stage with it.

I’m tempted to say that if you don’t love “little friends,” you’re missing much of ballet’s spell. Watch Swanilda and her friends (and their footwork); listen to their music, and the art form’s infectious brio gets under your skin.


Videos and images by New York City Ballet.

A correction was made on 
May 24, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the day that "Coppélia" performances begin at New York City Ballet. They begin on May 25, not May 26.

How we handle corrections

Alastair Macaulay has been the chief dance critic since 2007. He was previously the chief theater critic of The Financial Times, the chief dance critic for The Times Literary Supplement and the founding editor of the quarterly Dance Theatre Journal. More about Alastair Macaulay

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