The 18th-Century French pantomime ballet Ballet des Porcelaines, also known as The Teapot Prince, is being reimagined by Meredith Martin, professor of art history at New York University, and Phil Chan, choreographer and co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, a grassroots organization committed to eliminating yellowface and creating more positive representations of Asians in ballet. The creative pair will collaborate with several museums and universities—among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte, the Manufacture and National Museum of Sèvres, the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust in Brighton, and Princeton University—to revive this lost gem, along with a team consisting primarily of artists of Asian descent.

Chan, who has studied baroque dance for the past year under Patricia Beaman (NYU and Wesleyan professor of dance history, New York Baroque Dance Company member) will blend contemporary choreography with a baroque flavor, including traditional pantomime. Georgina Pazcoguin (NYCB’s first female Asian-American soloist, Final Bow for Yellowface co-founder, author of Swan Dive) and her colleague, Daniel Applebaum (NYCB soloist), will dance the lead roles of the Princess and Prince. Tyler Hanes (Broadway actor, singer, dancer, choreographer) will play the Sorcerer. Harriet Jung (Reid & Harriet) will design original costumes, creating a modern twist on eighteenth-century porcelain. Instruments of Time and Truth will perform a baroque-contemporary musical score devised by harpsichordist Dongsok Shin (REBEL) and violinist Leah Gale Nelson, along with composer Sugar Vendil (The Nouveau Classical Project), that combines live performance of the baroque score (by Nicolas-Racot de Grandval) with Vendil’s modern compositions featuring the sounds of porcelain clinking and shattering. The overall creative concept is based on kintsugi, a Japanese technique for repairing broken ceramics by mending them with gold or lacquer so as to highlight their flaws. In their creative process, they celebrate the lost historical fragments and imperfections of the work by making them stronger and more beautiful with their modern additions.

The original Ballet des Porcelaines, written by the comte de Caylus and staged around 1740 at a château outside of Paris, was based on an Orientalist fairy tale in the same literary milieu as Beauty and the Beast (1740). The story tells of an Asian sorcerer who lives on a “Blue Island” and transforms anyone who dares to trespass into porcelain cups, vases, and other wares. When the sorcerer turns a captive prince into a teapot, a princess comes to rescue her lover by stealing the sorcerer’s wand and turning him into a pagod, an eighteenth-century version of a porcelain bobblehead. Displayed today in museums like The Met, pagods were collectible trinkets that inspired Oriental caricatures in the performing arts. European choreographers mimicked the features and gestures of these porcelain figures, which persist in such iconic, problematic productions as The Nutcracker’s “Chinese Tea” dance.

While the original Ballet des Porcelaines—not performed since 1741—can be seen as an allegory for the aggressive European desire to know and steal the secrets of Chinese porcelain manufacture, the 2021 production will flip the narrative to center the actions and desires of Asian protagonists. Nothing survives of the ballet’s original set design, costumes, or choreography, which provides an opportunity both to reimagine and update the performance for contemporary, multiracial audiences. In the new version, the characters’ identities flip: the royals are now Chinese and the sorcerer is a mad European porcelain collector modeled on Augustus the Strong, founder of Meissen, the first European manufactory to succeed in making true porcelain. Rather than its original aristocratic setting, the dancers will now perform in public museums and spaces surrounded by chinoiserie artworks whose pejorative depictions of Asians are confronted and subverted. Ballet des Porcelaines also aspires to use an18th-century baroque mime vocabulary to comment on contemporary social events, such as Orientalism in the performing arts and the rise in anti-Asian xenophobia and hate crimes.

The ballet will tour the U.S. and Europe throughout 2022, adapting to a variety of settings including museum galleries, gardens, historic houses, and university theaters. Many performances will take place in close proximity to world-renowned porcelain collections and historic manufactories, animating these spaces and linking the 18th-century fairy tale to our present reality.

Tickets can be purchased from the Waddesdon Manor website