back Content Coppélia is a mechanical doll, conceived and created by Dr. Coppélius, whose megalomaniac dream is to bring it to life. When Franz fails to recognise the deception and falls in love with the doll, his fiancée Swanilda reveals steps in, reveals the doll’s mechanical secretn and the shock gives way to relief.

The fascination with the vision of breathing a soul into the inanimate continues unabated and has recently been given a boost by developments in the field of artificial intelligence. Progress creates new bodies and body images and thus also changes the range of our desires. The myth of the human-machine has moved from science fiction to our reality through the visions of transhumanism. Every day we enter into close physical connections with technological devices – where does the line between human and cyborg actually lie?

In 1870, the ballet “Coppélia” premiered in a choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon and to the music of Léo Delibes. The scenario is based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “The Sandman”, but leaves little of its eerily dark and abysmal side.

With “Coppélia”, French-Canadian Hélène Blackburn dares to tackle one of the most famous ballet subjects and dedicates herself to the themes behind it with her own dissecting, precise, fast-paced and neoclassical-cutting movement vocabulary. Further Recommendations