A smash hit
ALOST 18th-century French ballet, The Teapot Prince or Ballet des Porcelaines—an Orientalist fairy tale about a sorcerer who transforms trespassers into porcelain cups, vases and so on—will be reimagined at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, and the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, East Sussex, this summer.
Written by Anne Claude de TubièresGrimoard de Pestels de Lévis, comte de Caylus, marquis d’esternay, baron de Bransac (1692–1765), Ballet des Porcelaines was first staged in 1739 at a château on the outskirts of Paris and, after 1741, was rarely seen again, although it informed later ballets such as Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.
Its revival is the creation of Meredith Martin, an art-history professor at New York University, and choreographer Phil Chan and, where the original allegory was on European jealousy of Chinese porcelain manufacture, the new version turns things around. This time, the protagonists are Chinese and the sorcerer is a mad European collector modelled on Augustus II the Strong (1670–1733), the king of Poland and elector of Saxony who founded Meissen.
The parterre garden will be the setting at Waddesdon and the grand Music Room, with its walls of dragons and pagodas, in Brighton Pavilion; both have been chosen so the ballet might be performed in close proximity to renowned porcelain collections, accompanied by a new ‘baroquecontemporary musical score’—sugar Vendil’s reworking of Nicolas Racot de Grandval’s original composition, featuring the sounds of clinking and smashing porcelain. After Waddesdon on June 16–17 and Brighton Pavilion on June 19–21, the ballet tours Italy, finishing at the Sèvres Museum in Paris.
‘We have aimed to honour the ballet’s legacy, as well as reimagining it for the multiracial society we are in,’ explain Prof Martin and Mr Chan. Visit www.waddesdon.org.uk and www. brightonmuseums.org.uk/royalpavilion