{"id":69191,"date":"2026-06-03T14:25:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T14:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danceforyou-magazine.com\/?p=69191"},"modified":"2026-06-03T14:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T14:25:11","slug":"alices-adventures-in-wonderland-at-la-scala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danceforyou-magazine.com\/en\/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-at-la-scala\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland at La Scala"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s now-canonical masterpiece arrives at La Scala in the original Royal Ballet production, confirming both its structural sophistication and its enduring theatrical appeal. Yet the evening reveals a mixed interpretative landscape, where clarity of conception coexists with moments of reduced theatrical incisiveness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fifteen years after its creation for The Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em><\/strong>, set to the kaleidoscopic score by Joby Talbot<\/strong>, arrives at Teatro alla Scala<\/strong> in Milan not as a novelty, but as a firmly canonised work of twenty-first-century narrative ballet. What once registered as a bold structural gamble \u2013 an evening-length ballet built from episodic fragments, cinematic illusion and hybrid theatrical languages \u2013 now reads as an established aesthetic system, almost a self-contained grammar of contemporary spectacle.<\/p>\n

In its early years, the central question surrounding Alice<\/em> was whether Carroll\u2019s episodic universe could sustain choreographic continuity, or whether its succession of tableaux would dissolve dramatic tension into decorative sequence. That anxiety has largely faded. What remains is a work that embraces discontinuity as principle rather than flaw: a dramaturgy of perpetual metamorphosis, in which coherence emerges through transformation rather than linear progression.<\/p>\n

Equally decisive is Wheeldon\u2019s framing of the narrative through prologue and epilogue, recasting the ballet as a dream within a dream and quietly distancing it from childhood innocence. This is not Carroll\u2019s seven-year-old Alice,<\/strong> but an adolescent consciousness \u2013 curious, alert, slightly estranged \u2013 confronting the opaque logic of an adult world she can observe but not yet decode<\/strong>. In soft lavender and a brown bob, she inhabits a deliberately contemporary, non-mythologised register. Even the romantic subplot \u2013 her attachment to Jack, the Knave of Hearts \u2013 functions less as sentimental ornament than as narrative motor and tonal counterweight within Wheeldon\u2019s broader mosaic.<\/p>\n

Where the ballet continues to divide opinion is in its episodic architecture. Its succession of vividly imagined scenes can still resist cumulative dramatic pressure, dispersing emotional climax across shifting theatrical surfaces. Yet in performance the effect feels increasingly less like fragmentation than controlled proliferation: a staged world in which meaning emerges through continual reconfiguration.<\/p>\n

That same destabilisation extends to Wheeldon\u2019s treatment of theatrical space and language. One of the ballet\u2019s most memorable devices remains the moment in which an enlarged Alice peers through an impossibly tiny door towards the auditorium, only for dancers to burst among the spectators in a swirling waltz, confetti cascading over the seating rows: a sly reversal in which Wonderland migrates from stage to house and the proscenium briefly turns back upon its own audience<\/strong>. Elsewhere, quieter gestures echo Carroll\u2019s logic of semantic slippage. When Alice partially unfurls a banner reading \u201cSTART\u201d<\/em>, the incomplete image first isolates \u201cART\u201d<\/em>, then \u201cTART\u201d<\/em> \u2013 the pastry whose theft fuels the Knave of Hearts\u2019 predicament. Such fleeting visual puns encapsulate the choreographer\u2019s method: meaning is continually displaced, reframed and mischievously reassembled through altered perspective.<\/p>\n

Within this framework, La Scala soloist Camilla Cerulli<\/strong>\u2019s Alice offers a sustained and musically intelligent traversal of the role. Her performance is marked by clarity and stamina, shaping a figure of attentive curiosity rather than incandescent authority. Yet the interpretation stops short of propelling the character beyond observation into active dramaturgical agency; she does not quite elevate Alice from a responsive presence into a true driving force of the stage action. The comparison with earlier benchmark portrayals, such as the Royal Ballet\u2019s Sarah Lamb, inevitably highlights a difference of register: where Lamb radiated a more commanding theatrical luminosity, Cerulli opts for restraint, continuity and psychological understatement.<\/p>\n

As her romantic counterpart, first soloist Nicola Del Freo<\/strong>\u2019s Jack (the Knave of Hearts, here functioning as a kind of fragmented double within Alice\u2019s emotional imagination) offers a performance that is exemplary in purely classical terms: refined, secure and elegantly phrased, with assured partnering, and an overall delivery without any major technical flaw. But his effectiveness is inevitably circumscribed by the choreography itself, as Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s conception of the role remains deliberately underwritten, more a symbolic construct than a fully fleshed character. As a result, even such a polished and controlled interpretation finds itself with limited dramatic leverage, the role offering little substantive \u201cmeat\u201d in terms of expressive or narrative development. Del Freo brings refinement and classical poise to the stage, but the figure ultimately remains an exquisitely danced outline rather than a fully realised, emotionally resonant flesh-and-blood protagonist.<\/p>\n

The dual role of Lewis Carroll and the White Rabbit \u2013 completing the interpretative \u201ctrident\u201d alongside Alice and Jack and shifting between authorial shadow and paternal presence within the dream logic \u2013 is performed by soloist Mattia Semperboni<\/strong> with accuracy and clean articulation. Yet the White Rabbit, in particular, demands a more fractured internal energy, a nervous propulsion that exceeds precision and enters expressive instability. Here, however, the interpretation remains largely contained within secure execution. The elastic, neurotic quality often associated with earlier British readings of Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s work is only partially realised, and the character\u2019s defining urgency never fully tips into psychological or physical excess, resulting in a portrayal that is precise but insufficiently volatile.<\/p>\n