Quatuor Alfama

It is the story of a solitary and eccentric man who, in addition to making clocks and watches, also imagines and creates toys. He is in love with a life-size mechanical doll: Coppélia. He dreams that one day she will walk ‘like a princess on golden slippers across the living room’. In the city, everyone thinks that Coppélia is Coppélius' niece.

The story is best known thanks to the ballet Coppélia by Léo Delibes (1870), inspired by Der Sandmann by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (author of The Nutcracker, among others), a story tinged with strangeness. Coppélia also echoes Goethe's Faust, who sells his soul to the devil (1806 and 1832), or Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his marble statue (Ovid's Metamorphoses). Nor should we forget the reference to Gepetto, the toy maker who dreamed that his puppet Pinocchio would come to life in Carlo Collodi's novel (1883).

All these influences come together in a fascinating story, embellished with a touch of Commedia dell'arte, the popular Italian improvisational theatre of the 16th to 18th centuries.

Target audience: children aged 6 to 106

Duration: between 50 and 60 minutes

Cast:
Quatuor Alfama
Lucas Tavernier, actor
Liesbet Vereertbrugghen, text, direction and scenography