The indomitable Boshoi ballerina Svetlana Zakharova is the epitome of chic in Yuri Possokhov’s Gabrielle Chanel, playing the designer better known as Coco. Strings of pearls, cigarette held just so, lips pursed in a knowing half-smile. Zakharova’s long limbs cut shapes as if with the sharpest dressmakers’ scissors but Possokhov’s ballet offers only a limited glimpse behind her implacable facade. We see Coco dancing in cabaret clubs, finding love and loneliness, and designing for the Ballets Russes, where the cast of Bolshoi dancers – Vyacheslav Lopatin is particularly good – enjoy themselves riffing on ballet history.
It’s a stylish stage, entirely in monochrome with archive film setting the early 20th-century scene. Choice quotes from Chanel herself open each passage and they’re often more revealing than the dancing. It’s impressive to watch Zakharova held aloft in ecstatic lifts by Jacopo Tissi or dramatically swinging her legs side to side, like the balls in a Newton’s cradle, but it doesn’t ultimately give much insight into the woman or her art – although the subtleties of characterisation may be drowned out by Ilya Demutsky’s overblown music.
Also on the bill is Mauro Bigonzetti’s Come un Respiro from 2009, a self-consciously modern work of warping, unpretty poses that is regally balletic but not hugely sympathetic to the Handel score that inspired it. Despite the title, the choreography doesn’t breathe with Handel’s limpid music, nor dance over his rhythms. Bigonzetti’s mild mocking of baroque ornamentation needs a playfulness to carry it off, rather than these dancers’ haughty seriousness. But an honourable mention for the reinvented tutu that looks like a Slinky wrapped round a dancer’s waist. Eat your heart out, Chanel.
At the Coliseum, London, until 5 December.
.png?w=600)
