The rivalry between the human and the automata continues to find enacted on the ballet stage. The most recent adaptation of Coppélia (Scottish Ballet, 2022) sets the nineteenth-century story in Silicon Valley, reflecting a twenty-first-century anxiety over AI technology. The various versions of the ballet are based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), a gothic tale which adapts the Sandman folklore in featuring Nathaneal torn between his fascination for Olympia, manufactured by Dr. Coppelius / Coppola / Spallanzani, and his love for the girl, Clara. Hoffmann’s tale paves the way for Sigmund Freud’s theory on The Uncanny (1919). 

The ballet Coppélia (premièred in 1870) adapts Hoffman’s tale while enabling Swanhilda to master the tricks of Coppelia and rescue Franz from an impending doom. The story of the machine-doll gets a second life in another ballet, Petrushka (premièred in 1911), featuring a love triangle between three puppets, Petrushka, the Moor and the Ballerina at a Shrovetide Fair. The ballet derives from an ancient Russian tale. Petrushka falls in love with the Ballerina but she likes the Moor instead. Petrushka attacks the Moor in a rage only to be dismembered. The two ballets end similarly in an apparent restoration of human supremacy. 

Dance as an art form runs on human performance, and therefore, the ballet featuring automata capitalizes on a paradox, that is, human performing automata which imitate humans. The two ballets thus shed light on at once the limits and uniqueness of humanity. This paper focuses on the moments when the essence of the human undergoes challenge: when Swanhilda masters the movement of the automata in Coppélia and when Petrushka suffers from his unrequited love in Petrushka. These moments present a cauldron of humanity, which can be likened to the encounter between Frankenstein and his creature. This paper will examine motion in Coppélia and affect in Petrushka with a view to investigating how these two factors perform and underscore humanity. An embodied methodology related to dance will be adopted which shall combine Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the body as an open system with Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory in order to reconfigure the core of what is human as it is staged in ballet.