I was genuinely impressed by the production’s visual intelligence. The set design, lighting, and costumes formed a coherent stage picture, and the spatial composition of ensembles was beautiful to watch even from a distance — it felt carefully curated rather than merely danced.
However, the production simultaneously insists on a historically coded nineteenth-century European setting and then undermines its own visual language with added contemporary motifs (the suffragette references) and casting choices that treat bodies as interchangeable signs. In a work where period imagery is doing so much narrative work, that creates a semiotic mismatch that I found hard to ignore.
The fantasy scenes tolerate abstraction; the domestic “real-world” layer does not — or at least it requires a different visual strategy. Beautiful to look at, but conceptually uneven.
One additional detail I found confusing concerned the “sweets” divertissement. The confectionery was labelled as макiвник (in Ukrainian), yet the choreography was performed to the traditional Russian trepak music. In the original ballet, this section is musically and culturally framed as a Russian character dance, and the introduction of a differently coded label without a corresponding musical or choreographic shift felt inconsistent.
For me, this created an unnecessary layer of cultural mismatch, which again distracted from the festive and fairy-tale atmosphere. Rather than enriching the scene, it raised questions about intent and coherence that felt out of place in a children’s holiday ballet.
Quality: 4
Value for money: 4
