Principal ballerina Sena Hidaka embodies Cleopatra with sinuous movements and regal grace to launch the ballet. Premiering in 2017, Tetsuya Kumakawa directed, choreographed, wrote the scenario and pieced together the score using music from the Danish composer Carl Nielsen for his first full length original production. Drawing from a range of literary, historical, and even balletic sources, Kumakawa’s vision humanizes the legendary queen while exploring the heights and depths of power. 

The otherworldly staircase and snake imagery in the short prologue foreshadow these contrasting views of Cleopatra throughout the ballet. Although achieving goddess-like status in Egypt as a savvy politician and scholar navigating instability as a woman and the last of the Ptolemy dynasty, Roman propaganda long painted her as a ruthless femme fatale. Kumakawa’s version melds the two.

Overall, Hidaka imbues the tenacious strategian queen with an appealing vulnerability. In Act One, Hidaka is both canny and cruel. She dismisses her immature brother/ husband (Shu Kurihara) with disdain, and hones her weapons of seduction and poison. 

For world-building, Daniel Ostling’s minimalistic, geometric gold and turquoise staging recalls the shape of the pyramids, as does the consistently gorgeous costumes by Ayako Maeda. Bent wrists, turned heads, elbows and knees at sharp angles form a distinctive choreographic vocabulary, effectively integrated within classical steps to mostly avoid two-dimensional stereotypes.

There’s also a heavy dose of serpentine seduction. An early pas de deux between Hidaka and the male slave (Yeonghwi Kim) chosen for pleasure, is sinuously erotic. From writhing prone to sexually-suggestive lifts, their movements are both earthy and savage; afterwards, Hidaka dispatches the slave with poison, a sly Easter egg for ballotmanes referencing Michel Fokine's 1909 one-act for Ballets Russes, “Cléopâtre.”