The unwieldy name of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s bio-ballet carries the intimation that not everyone will know who Chanel was. Tell that to Brisbane, where Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon sold out all 17 performances before the season started.

I reckon Chanel herself would have gone for a more streamlined title. She was, after all, famous for advising you should glance in the mirror before going out and take one thing off.

Still, spelling things out is how Lopez Ochoa’s ballet works. Working with her longtime artistic collaborator Nancy Meckler, she takes key events from the couturier’s life to provide a straightforward timeline from youthful insignificance to lasting international stature. 

Those events are clear enough. Less clear are Chanel’s motivations and inner life, even though Lopez Ochoa gives them literal presence in the form of a double called Shadow Chanel. (Intriguingly, Christopher Wheeldon has exactly the same device in his Oscar for The Australian Ballet, in which Oscar Wilde is intermittently accompanied by a young man called Oscar’s Shadow.) 

Lopez Ochoa briskly covers the ground in 13 scenes and 90 minutes of stage time. She knows how to keep a show moving. Touched upon are Chanel’s stint as a music-hall performer, her entrée into design via millinery, the development of a new, freeing aesthetic in clothing, detours into love affairs that end badly and competition from newer approaches to how women might dress.

There’s a never-ending feast for the eyes in Jérôme Kaplan’s chic costumes and sets, designs entirely in keeping with Chanel’s strict, less-is-more ethos but at the same time sumptuous and dramatically effective.

Lopez Ochoa’s dance-making is most striking when taking inspiration from early 20^th century modernism. Workers in Chanel’s atelier are human machines, blank-faced acolytes in sexy black bodysuits literally defrock women who have strayed from the Chanel path and there’s a pungent summoning of the Ballets Russes, which Chanel supported via her friendship with Stravinsky.

The death of Chanel’s great love Boy Capel (ardent Patricio Revé on opening night) had wonderfully theatrical flair, underscored by bold brass and thunderous drumming in Peter Salem’s bespoke score. The bringing to life of Chanel’s trademark interlocking Cs was another dance high point, accompanied by Satie-like piano. The dancers (Georgia Swan and Edison Manuel) looked delectable in sleek white unitards with a bold black stripe.

Less flavourful and sometimes too unsubtle are conventional group numbers including an early Parisian society bash and the later creation of Chanel No5, although the frocks really are exceptionally pretty.

The darker material is far more interesting. Chanel’s wartime affair with “Baron” Hans Günther von Dincklage, a high-ranking Nazi, is incendiary, nightmarish stuff kept short and sharp. Salem’s music rumbles with dark percussion and insistent piano chords as Chanel (Neneka Yoshida) and Dincklage (Vito Bernosconi) grapple feverishly.

One-arm lifts have a master-race vibe and faceless mannequins standing in for Dincklage’s entourage are genuinely chilling. Chanel was known to be anti-Semitic and it’s clear what she thinks on that front at least. Otherwise she is a closed book. At the end Chanel is bloodied, unbowed and essentially unexplored meaningfully as a character. Yoshida (there are three other Cocos during the season) dances indefatigably but isn’t given enough to work with. Coco Chanel is an entertaining picture of what the woman did, not who she was.

The addition of Shadow Chanel (Kaho Kato) is visually pleasing (it can’t be said often enough how great the show looks). In her uniform of slim-fitting black trousers, black top and pearls, Shadow Chanel is a tough cookie essentially there to tell Chanel to pull herself together and get on with it.

For depth, though, we need to go to Salem’s score. It’s a monster of a thing, asking for the biggest orchestra ever fitted into QPAC’s Playhouse (three percussionists and two pianists gamely play from under the stage). There are also sampled and synthesised percussion sounds and some electronic manipulation and enhancement of the live musicians. It used to be that electronically produced sounds were considered something apart from an orchestra; even a little suspect. Now they are another important weapon in the armoury. As QB’s music director and chief conductor Nigel Gaynor has said, technology provides “a very effective means of using a far broader sound palate than a symphony orchestra [alone]”.

Gaynor conducts Camerata Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra in this mammoth undertaking, bringing to vivid life nightclubs from a century ago, frivolity and war, the seaside at Deauville where Chanel’s sailor look was born, a regimented workshop, the romance of a fragrance, the sophistication of a brand and more.

I went to Gaynor for greater detail about the orchestra and orchestration as unfortunately QB’s program for Coco Chanel didn’t include a music note. As well as the usual forces found in a conventional orchestra Salem’s kit includes vibraphone, large glockenspiel, woodblocks, shakers, tam tam, cowbell, a snare drum and metal plates being struck and amplified. QB principal pianist Roger Cui plays a grand piano while a second keyboardist, Yuko Yoshioka, is heard in various guises, including playing sampled sounds.

At the beginning of the ballet Yoshioka plays a detuned upright piano sound that acts as a wistful theme weaving through the ballet. In addition, the upright “is reminiscent of instruments in French (and European) nightclubs in 1920s and 1930s”, says Gaynor.

This is where the collage fashioned from Chanel’s life has real resonance.

Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon ends on October 19.

This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in The Australian on October 6.