Georgian Ballerinas : Elene Glurdjidze : The Guardian



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Elene Glurdjidze
COPPELIA

by Judith Mackrell (July 12, 2003 The Guardian)

There are so few comedies in the 19th-century repertory, so few good comedy ballets, period, that any dancers cast in Coppélia owe it to themselves - and to their profession - to have a good time. There was, however, nothing dutiful about the performance given by Elena Glurdjidze with English National Ballet.

As Swanilda, the ballet's larky heroine, Glurdjidze's greatest asset is her grin. She romps through the ballet with a terrific smile: half urchin's giggle, half witty, cat-like grin. Glurdjidze's other major asset is her transparent and very grown-up technique. Trained at the Vaganova School and principal with the St Petersburg ballet theatre before joining ENB last year, she dances with an assurance that allows her to revel in the full range of her choreography.

Unlike many younger, needier dancers, Glurdjidze doesn't struggle to seduce us with spectacular effects. She knows she can put the audience in her pocket simply with her squeaky-clean footwork, arrow-like jump and deft, musical gestures. She just gets on with the role, and the ballet's mix of mild mischief and village romance gels artfully around her.

Dmitri Gruzdyev, as her silly boyfriend Franz, isn't so consistently appealing. He has a tendency to over-mug his reactions (encouraged by Ronald Hynd's jolly, but slightly literal production) and he is not the most focused of partners. But he has a swaggering technique that serves the muddle-headed vanity of his character perfectly. In act two, when he is lured into the sinister, surreal romp around Dr Coppélius's workshop, his comic instincts are spot on.

The ancient doll-maker Coppélius is not the dancing centre of the ballet, but he is its dramatic focus, and the chemistry he forms with the other characters is critical. Gary Avis makes his opening moves with even more blatant exaggeration than Gruzdyev: you can all but see the subtitles underlining every senile mishap and arthritic stagger. But once Avis takes centre stage, he is very funny. As Coppélius tries to bring his beloved girl-doll to life, Avis's staring eyes, and twitchy crooked limbs articulate subtle layers of his character's folly, from his naive cunning to his mad hubris to his bleak core of loneliness. It is expertly pitched, and Glurdjidze and Gruzdyev play up to Avis's performance with gusto, sparkling comic asides and dramatic nuance that all seem freshly minted. This show may have been ENB's 374th performance of this production, but there were moments when this trio made us feel it was their first.