This bio-ballet on Coco Chanel is a never-ending feast for the eyes

Jerome Kaplan’s chic costumes and sets in Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon keep with the fashion icon’s strict, less-is-more ethos.

Neneka Yoshida as Coco Chanel and Kaho Kato as Shadow Chanel. Picture; David Kelly

The unwieldy name of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s bio-ballet carries the intimation that not everyone will know who Chanel was.

Tell that to Brisbane, where Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon sold out all 17 performances before the season started.

I reckon Chanel herself would have gone for a more streamlined title. She was, after all, famous for advising you should glance in the mirror before going out and take one thing off.

Still, spelling things out is how Lopez Ochoa’s ballet works.

She takes key events from the couturier’s life to provide a straightforward timeline from youthful insignificance to lasting international stature.

Lopez Ochoa briskly covers the ground in 13 scenes and 90 minutes of stage time. She knows how to keep a show moving.

Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Iconsold out all 17 performances before the season started. Picture: David Kelly

Touched upon are Chanel’s stint as a music-hall performer, her entrée into design via millinery, the development of a new, freeing aesthetic in clothing, detours into love affairs that end badly and competition from newer approaches to how women might dress.

There’s a never-ending feast for the eyes in Jerome Kaplan’s chic costumes and sets, designs entirely in keeping with Chanel’s strict, less-is-more ethos but at the same time sumptuous and dramatically effective.

Lopez Ochoa’s dance-making is most striking when taking inspiration from early 20th century modernism. Workers in Chanel’s atelier are human machines, blank-faced acolytes in sexy black bodysuits literally defrock women who have strayed from the Chanel path and there’s a pungent summoning of the Ballets Russes, which Chanel supported via her friendship with Stravinsky.

Lopez Ochoa’s dance-making is most striking when taking inspiration from early 20th century modernism. Picture: David Kelly

The death of Chanel’s great love Boy Capel (ardent Patricio Reve on opening night) has wonderfully theatrical flair, as does the bringing to life of Chanel’s trademark interlocking Cs. The dancers (Georgia Swan and Edison Manuel) look delectable in sleek white unitards with a bold black stripe.

Less flavourful are conventional group numbers including an early Parisian society bash and the later creation of Chanel No5, although the frocks really are exceptionally pretty.

The darker material is far more interesting. Chanel’s wartime affair with Baron von Dincklage, a high-ranking Nazi, is incendiary, nightmarish stuff kept short and sharp. Peter Salem’s score rumbles with dark percussion and insistent piano chords as Chanel (Neneka Yoshida) and Dincklage (Vito Bernosconi) grapple feverishly.

One-arm lifts have a master-race vibe and faceless mannequins standing in for Dincklage’s entourage are genuinely chilling. Chanel was known to be anti-Semitic and it’s clear what she thinks on that front at least.

Otherwise her inner life is a closed book. At the end Chanel is bloodied, unbowed and essentially unexplored as a character.

Yoshida (there are three other Cocos during the season) dances indefatigably but isn’t given enough to work with. The addition of a Shadow (Kaho Kato) is visually pleasing but doesn’t go far beneath the surface.

For depth we need to go to Salem’s score. It’s a monster of a thing, asking for the biggest orchestra ever fitted into QPAC’s Playhouse (three percussionists and two pianists gamely play from under the stage).

There are also sampled and synthesised sounds and some electronic manipulation and enhancement of the live musicians.

Nigel Gaynor conducts Camerata Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra in this mammoth undertaking, bringing to vivid life nightclubs from a century ago, frivolity and war, the seaside at Deauville where Chanel’s sailor look was born, a regimented workshop, the romance of a fragrance, the sophistication of a brand and more.

This is where the collage fashioned from Chanel’s life has real resonance.

Coco Chanel; the Life of a Fashion Icon
Queensland Ballet
Playhouse, QPAC Brisbane

Tickets: $123-$200. Bookings: online: Duration: Two hours including interval. Ends October 19