Coppelia. - Brancaccio Theatre, Rome, Italy - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1995 by Maria Elisa Buccella

Professionally, thirty-four-year-old choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti is a product of the Rome Opera ballet school, whose corps de ballet he later joined. But it was with Aterballetto--a fine Italian dance company--that he achieved his artistic maturity as a performer and began his career as a choreographer. Beginning with his very first dance, Bigonzetti has seemed to have within him the seed of a style that would one day bear fruit. Four years after his first choreography, his style is now recognizably his own, as shown by a new Coppelia created for Rome Opera Ballet.

An accomplished dancer, Bigonzetti truly loves ballet and understands it as a sequence of living shapes, whose raison d'etre is movement. Far from departing from the rigor of classical ballet, his method of constructing choreography emphasizes its technique, taking every shape to the extreme and then disassembling it. In his dances the various phrases or parts follow one another in constant evolution and are always closely connected. His great musical sensitivity is found everywhere.

Another of his qualities--good taste--is evident in his Coppelia, where black and white prevail, along with the range of all possible shades of gray, in the magnificent set design that represents a surreal city, created by Maurizio Varamo and inspired by the work of the Dutch artist most favored in American college dormitories, M.C. Escher. Also in black and white are the costumes by Cristopher Millar and Lois Swandal; the essential beauty found in them is partly reminiscent of certain contemporary fashions.

Although he retained Delibes's original score, Bigonzetti did not conceive this ballet as a fairy tale; instead he chose to remain close to the dark atmosphere of E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann, a disturbing story whose ending, one soon understands, will not be happy. As in Hoffmann's tale, Nathaniel (as the character usually known as Franz is called) is conquered by the charm of a woman who is really an experiment, a technological being who is also a symbol and who will lead Nathaniel, loved in vain by Clara, to madness. The choreography closes with Clara's scream, announcing Nathaniel's death.

The performance by Rome Opera Ballet was better than many in recent times. Nathaniel, Olympia, and Clara were excellently portrayed by Mario Marozzi, Silvia Guelfi, and Emanuela Maturi, respectively. Raffaele Paganini, as Coppelius, was less convincing: his dancing was technically faultless, but his interpretation exceedingly exaggerated.