Ballez: Travesty Doll Play Ballez (after Coppélia)

Travesty Doll Play Ballez (after Coppélia) is a full-length Ballez performance which reinvents the 1870 travesty ballet Coppélia. This revisionist creation brings its history to light, showing how gender variance and transgression have always been embedded in ballet, with Ballez dancers as rightful inheritors of that his/her/their story. This new story ballet focuses on the relationship between Dolls and their Doll-Maker, on teachers and students, on cycles of abuse in ballet, on control and freedom, on fake and real, and on dancers being forced to perpetually automate the performance of gender in order to belong…ultimately playing with mainstream notions of gender in ballet until they fall apart.