Life Moves: My first Coppélia (with thanks to the Vancouver Ballet Society)
By Kaija Pepper
The Vancouver Ballet Society, the not-for-profit organization that has published Dance International since 1977, celebrates its 75th anniversary. In earlier years, VBS was a presenter, mounting shows at downtown theatres. Some were mixed bills by local choreographers, others were gala affairs, such as the one in which two high-profile guests from London’s Royal Ballet starred — Lynn Seymour (who grew up in Vancouver) and Christopher Gable. I saw the VBS production of Coppélia as a child, which I wrote about in Falling into Flight: A Memoir of Life and Dance. That chapter is reprinted here as a tribute to the society, which has been such a longstanding support to dance in Vancouver.
A Warm and Hopeful Place
In front of my first full-length ballet, the sheer presence of powerful, physically engaged bodies sucked me right onstage into every run, jump, toss of the head and lift of the hand. Coppélia had been choreographed by Arthur Saint-Léon almost one hundred years earlier for the Paris Opera, but it was as if each configuration of individual and group force was being created right then and there. The movement seemed inevitable and convincing, like it had to happen exactly the way it did.
The performers were mostly senior students from local dance schools assembled by the Vancouver Ballet Society; while they might have been rough around the edges, young people — working on instinct, with energy to freely lavish — often inhabit movement most acutely. Among them was sixteen-year-old Reid Anderson (who would go on to direct the National Ballet of Canada and Stuttgart Ballet) in the role of Franz, a village boy who falls in love with a life-size doll he mistakes for a real girl.
In the new millennium, Coppélia is not one of the popular classics; it doesn’t have the wit of La Fille Mal Gardée (in Frederick Ashton’s 1960 version of the 18th-century ballet, the one I am familiar with) or the beauty of the white scenes in Swan Lake and Giselle. Also, the passive female beauty at the centre of the story grates as a plot device. In 1965, though, it spoke to something very present in many minds, certainly in mine. Having only recently stopped playing with my Barbie doll, I completely understood Franz’s attraction to Coppélia’s perfect stillness, the way you could dream into it, the way it could be yours. When I had dressed Barbie up in an evening gown called Silken Flame — a white satin skirt with a red-velvet bodice that showed off her elongated curves and smooth impermeable skin — I had become Barbie, and was under the vague assumption that Barbie, one day, would be me.
That night at the Vancouver Playhouse, Mom and I sat quietly beside each other in the dark as Coppélia raced by to the bustling music of Léo Delibes. The seats were filled with women and girls, and some men and boys, all of us dreaming into the dance. Shifting, sighing and clapping in the theatre’s warm and hopeful space, our motor neurons sparked and fired so fast it was almost like we were dancing, too. Gorging on every step by every character, melting into the same music at the same time, we were happily lost in the prowess of those athletic, aesthetic bodies, lost but also found in a theatrical event designed to make everyone welcome.
Excerpted from Falling into Flight: A Memoir of Life and Dance by Kaija Pepper, published by Signature Editions, 2020. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
