As children, George Balanchine and the famed ballerina Alexandra Danilova danced together in the popular 19th-century ballet Coppélia at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater. Many decades later, in 1974, Balanchine enlisted Danilova—a longtime teacher at the School of American Ballet, who had danced the central role of Swanilda to acclaim—to help him stage the ballet for the company. The resulting production is a full-length work of bountiful charm and wit, the frolicsome tale of a young woman who poses as a doll when she senses her paramour has become bewitched by a toymaker’s mechanical creation. With its vivid and nimble choreography, the ballet also pays tribute to the father of classical dance, Marius Petipa, on whose production it was based.
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