Chanel tribute favours style over substance
Modanse
Svetlana Zakharova, London Coliseum ★★★☆☆
Astandard stalls seat for the new double bill at the Coliseum from Svetlana Zakharova and fellow Bolshoi luminaries will set you back well over £100. So what – and at a time when the Royal Ballet is serving up Coppélia just up the road – do you get for your money?
The centrepiece of the evening tries hard. Premiered at the Bolshoi earlier this year, Gabrielle Chanel, by choreographer Yuri Possokhov, tells the story of the great fashion designer in a dozen vignettes, and has several undeniable virtues. Whisking us from her days as a cabaret singer, to her meeting grand amour Arthur “Boy” Capel and creating some of the scents and outfits that made her worldfamous, it moves with a purpose, and offers plenty for the eye to take in.
There are glossy, era- and scenesetting projections, suitably sleek costume and stage designs that follow Chanel’s signature black-and-white colour scheme, and, of course, some very fine dancers indeed.
Zakharova is now 40, but is still dancing supremely well: as lithe, lyrical and eye-catchingly chic as ever. What’s more, her natural glamour, imperious, 5ft 9in frame and temperamental hauteur make her perfect casting for the fashion legend: you very much “buy” her in this role. She is valiantly supported, too, by the likes of Mikhail Lobukhin as the young dandy Étienne Balsan, Denis Savan as a perfumer and, especially, Vyacheslav Lopatin in the two Diaghilev ballets of which we get snippets.
What the piece lacks, however, is innovative music or choreography. Possokhov’s neoclassical steps do their stuff without ever really exciting, and exactly the same goes for Ilya Demutsky’s pre-recorded, completely unmemorable score. These shortcomings are laid particularly bare during the reimagined snippet of one of the Ballets Russes pieces that Chanel designed, Apollo – golly, do you miss the Balanchine/stravinsky partnership of the original.
The piece is also short on fresh insights, and makes the mistake of ignoring the darker side of Chanel’s life and psyche, especially her “horizontal collaboration” with the Nazis. Working this in would have been braver, and so much more interesting: the essential, morally challenging grit in the oyster.
There’s another UK premiere: Mauro Bigonzetti’s 2017 piece Come un Respiro
(Like a Breath). On paper, it’s the sort of thing you might expect from our own Christopher Wheeldon – a substantial, abstract multi-movement piece for ensembles big and small – but it has none of the propulsive momentum or inventiveness of the Wheeldon equivalent. However ravishing the (again, pre-recorded) Handel score and competent the neoclassical steps – and however well designed they are to show off Zakharova’s length of limb – there’s an “and then, and then, and then” quality to it.
A perfectly pleasant, could-do-worse evening, then? Certainly. But might you do better to spend your cash on
Coppélia instead? I should coco.
Until tonight. Tickets: 020 7845 9300 londoncoliseum.org