For his new dance work, emerging choreographer Scott Elstermann has adapted the story of the 1911 Ballets Russes production of Petrushka for what he describes in the program as his first “full length contemporary dance” transposition. To be more precise, he claims to be “transporting the core elements” of the ballet – namely a love triangle between three life-size dolls who are animated by an evil magician – into the narrative setting of a 20th century tennis match.

It’s an odd but not unprecedented conceit. The Ballets Russes’ bad boy and modern dance wunderkind Vaslav Nijinsky (who played Petrushka) was to famously shock and confused audiences with his own 1913 work Jeux, featuring quasi-queer athletic poses adopted by three dancers dressed in tennis outfits. Elstermann however does not share Nijinsky’s fascination with hard, sexy bodies, or the then-new forms of modern athletics, nor Nijinsky’s tendency for elongated formal posing.

Scott Elstermann’s Petrushka (Game, Set, Match), April 2022. Photo © Daniel Grant Photography.

Elstermann by contrast floats his work on a sense of airy whimsy. Petrushka (Game, Set,...