Review | Hong Kong Ballet’s Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon disappoints despite beautiful visuals
- The costumes are ravishing and the sets elegantly minimalist, but Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon struggles to generate emotional impact
- The story is difficult to follow unless you study the two-page synopsis in detail, while the dancing was mostly strong and convincing
Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon is a new full-length ballet created for the Hong Kong Ballet by a top-notch international team: choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and her frequent collaborators, designer Jérôme Kaplan, composer Peter Salem and dramaturge Nancy Meckler.
Whether you see Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel as admirable, despicable or a mixture of both, she was a strong character. Disappointingly, this production does no more than skim the surface of her complex life.
For a ballet about one of the greatest designers of all time, the designs are a feast for the eyes. Kaplan’s costumes are ravishing, not only in their beauty and subtle homage to Chanel, but in the way they express character, mood and period.
His deceptively simple, elegantly minimalist sets are equally effective – the use of the two moving staircases is brilliantly imagined – and are enhanced by Billy Chan’s superb lighting.
The problem is that, while the work is visually stunning and Lopez Ochoa is clearly an accomplished choreographer, overall the production fails to engage the emotions.
