Keeping the Wilis away

Boston Ballet's Giselle makes even the tulle look good

by Jeffrey Gantz

GISELLE, Music by Adolphe Adam. Choreography by Leonid Lavrovsky after Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. Libretto by Théophile Gautier and Jules Vernoy Henri de Saint-Georges after a theme by Heinrich Heine. Staged by Anna-Marie Holmes. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Wang Center October 8 (Koltun and Zachary Hench), 9 (Ribeiro and Armand), 10 (Tara Hench and Simon Ball, matinee; Ponomarenko and Plotnikov, evening), and 11 (Suárez and Thrussell).

Maybe this won't be a watershed year for Boston Ballet, but right now it sure looks like one. The artistic director who put the company on the map, Bruce Marks, has finished his transition year and handed the reins over to his successor, Anna-Marie Holmes. Boston Ballet's experiment at extending its big productions to three weekends has not drawn big audiences, so the company's had to revert to two weekends; what's more, this season it's moving two of its six productions into the more intimate Shubert Theatre (1400 capacity as opposed to the Wang Center's 3800). And both the corps and Boston Ballet II have been downsized. Hard not to view these developments as a retrenchment.

This season's opener, Giselle, sums up the difficulties facing this or any other company at the end of the millennium. Ballet as we know it isn't even 200 years old, and it hasn't produced much in the way of classical repertoire; Boston Ballet's inventory numbers two early works, Giselle and Coppélia; the three Tchaikovsky stand-bys, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker; and the Prokofiev pair of Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella. To this slender foundation the company has added Bruce Wells's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the John Cranko Onegin and The Taming of the Shrew, and some new works by its resident choreographer, Daniel Pelzig, as well as calling on contemporary artists like Lila York and, of course, preserving the Balanchine legacy. Over the Bruce Marks period the company did a decent job of commissioning new pieces and bringing in offbeat fare. But it seems that if you want big audiences, at least in Boston, you have to stage the traditional favorites. Even well-done Balanchine doesn't pack the house. The Wang Center does take a lot of packing; it's also worth remembering that Boston is far from the largest city in the US and yet Boston Ballet is among the top five companies in North America. Given that the city's aesthetic traditions are rooted in art, music, and literature, not dance (or opera), maybe this is as good as it can get.

Giselle is typical of the problems confronting a modern-day company in that it has lots of dancing for the hardcore balletomane but less in the way of dramatic cogency and psychological insight -- first-timers will probably need to consult the program in order to follow the plot. In other words, it's old-fashioned. Our heroine is a simple Rhineland country girl with two admirers, the direct, rough-edged Hilarion and the hunky but courtly Albrecht. She also appears to have a dodgy heart, so her mother tries to keep her from dancing. Albrecht swears eternal love (ballet-mime refresher course: second and third fingers of right hand pointed heavenward) and wins her hand, but matters get complicated when a hunting party arrives from the distant castle and the Princess Bathilde reveals that she too is engaged: her sweetie isn't around, and neither is Giselle's. They're both Albrecht, of course, and it all comes unraveled when Hilarion discovers Albrecht's sword (proof he's a noble) and Giselle's heart breaks at her lover's perfidy while Bathilde looks on in distress.

Think of this first act as the 19th-century version of Monica, Bill, and Hillary. Bill's problem we know, but what's Albrecht up to? Is he scheming to seduce Giselle before marrying Bathilde? Or does he honestly love Giselle and hope that his official engagement will somehow fall through? Albrecht doesn't get to dance out much of his feelings, so he has to mime them, which limits the performer. Act two at least has a clearer storyline. The departed Giselle is initiated into the company of Wilis, the ghosts of maidens betrayed in love, and when Hilarion arrives to mourn her, they dance him to death. They're about to do the same to the grieving Albrecht, but Giselle pleads for him, and after the pair have danced out their love Albrecht is spared while Giselle finds peace. Sounds like Carrie, except that the Wilis wear ankle-length white tulle and execute finishing-school moves to afternoon-tea music. I know, Giselle would turn over in her grave if a company ditched the tulle, but these ladies need motorcycle jackets or mini-skirts, or maybe they should go goth -- anything to show us they're genuinely bad.

Riot grrrls or no, the one thing that can redeem this ballet is a dynamite Giselle and Albrecht -- and since the choreography isn't exactly explosive (Giselle was one of the first ballets to put the ladies in toe shoes), it has to be their shared chemistry that lights up the stage. Boston Ballet provides the familiar (if you saw this production last time out, in '94) russet canopy of foliage and rustic, half-timbered house with flowering windowbox and gable dovecote in the first act, set against a distant castle that's remote and isolated and not very inviting (easy to see why Albrecht would rather spend his time with the peasants). The second-act forest of winter oaks with ruined abbey draws (as Balanchine did for Robert Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze) directly on Caspar David Friedrich -- nothing like borrowing from the best. It's gradually illuminated by a magical blue light (shades of the Met's current Parsifal) that reveals Giselle's grave marker to be not Albrecht's sword but a rough wooden cross -- just one example of this set's resonating metaphorical depth. And the Boston Ballet orchestra, under Jonathan McPhee, provides its usual sensitive support.

That leaves it up to the dancers. Without a lead couple who sizzle the way Trinidad Sevillano and Patrick Armand did back in '91, this isn't going to be a great production, but the three opening-weekend pairs I saw make it a very good one. Pollyana Ribeiro creates an ingenue-like first-act Giselle that underlines the contrast with her mad scene at the cost of being a little one-dimensional. When she lets her hair down she's scary, her facial expressions suggesting Audrey Hepburn and Suzanne Farrell. In the second act she's superbly focused. Ribeiro can look cute, but I suspect she's actually a late bloomer (Barolo rather than Beaujolais) who at age 35 or 40 will still be expanding her emotional range. Right now she's not quite intense enough for the conflagratory Armand, whose passion and guilt threaten to burn down the house -- but I don't know what lady in the company would suit him better. This is a partnership in the making -- it just needs a little time.

The husband-and-wife pairing of Viktor Plotnikov and Larissa Ponomarenko is a partnership made in Heaven -- at least when they dance together. Ponomarenko's innocence always has the hint of unexpected knowledge and sophistication behind it; she exudes class from every pore, and the nuances of her phrasing are unbelievable (like McPhee, she makes the music sound better than it really is). Where Ribeiro's mad Giselle is almost feral, Ponomarenko's is complex, doubt-ridden, Ophelia-like. Plotnikov's Albrecht is big and soft but with an edge of rakery; you can see that it's his love for Giselle that's keeping him in line. You could watch this pairing for five nights in a row and there'd still be depths to sound.

By comparison Jennifer Gelfand and Laszlo Berdo look pretty straightforward, Giselle and Albrecht in high school. But appearances can deceive. Berdo hints at repressed anger (the coldness of a castle upbringing?); it's in wooing Giselle that he finds himself. Gelfand is all sunshine as she skips out on stage, but she's not sure Giselle is ready for a serious boyfriend, and her body language suggests she may have unintentionally encouraged Hilarion. Her mad scene is Juliet to Ponomarenko's Ophelia; in the second act she and Berdo snuggle up like flannel on a cold night. This pairing gives you fabulous detail that you can see first time -- you just have to watch carefully. (And don't overlook Gelfand in her scrumptious peasant pas de deux with Paul Thrussell: where she used to show off, she now makes what's difficult look tantalizingly easy.)

Gelfand and Berdo also have the most sympathetic Hilarion -- or perhaps it's just that by Saturday night I was looking harder. Carlos Iván Santos is thoughtful, even poetic, a real challenge to Berdo (they could actually exchange roles) except that he's almost too inward. Reagan Messer is more of a regular guy, Yuri Yanowsky more of a regular villain. The three Myrthas (the Queen of the Wilis) I saw last weekend were the three I saw in '94. Nadia Thompson is still stiff and angry (this dancer, bless her, just doesn't do anything for me); Kyra Strasberg is still sensuous and angry, with feathery bourrées that hardly seem to touch the stage -- she's so engaging, she makes all the white tulle look good. (Words can't express how accomplished you have to be to make that tulle look good to this critic.) The surprise here is returning principal Aleksandra Koltun, who frustrated me in '94 but scores big in '98, the Queen Mab of Myrthas, her technique serene in its impeccable control, her emotions overflowing -- she acts stern in front of the other Wilis, but she's desperate for her jilting sweetheart to show up so she can forgive him. She was a joy to watch Saturday.

This is not a flashy Giselle. Consider Jennifer Glaze's Bathilde: Thursday night your typical bored and boring bitch, but by Saturday (either she improved or I did) a young royal who's as much a victim as Albrecht: patronizing, but also pleased that Giselle too is engaged; and devastated when it becomes clear that Albrecht loves Giselle -- he wasn't just a trophy fiancé. (That's why it makes sense to have Bathilde turn up in act two as one of the Wilis.) Giselle is not by nature a flashy ballet, but in this production it's an affecting one. (Not least in the beautiful, well-behaved Russian wolfhounds that graced the opening weekend.)

And that's what, I hope, will see the company through what may be a few difficult years. Audiences expecting cheap thrills will be disappointed: the pyrotechnics here are emotional rather than physical. But there's a lot to look forward to in this company: mature artists like Armand and Strasberg and Ponomarenko and Plotnikov; big developing artists like Ribeiro and Gelfand and Berdo and Thrussell; the unexplored talents of returnees Koltun and Adriana Suárez; and the obvious potential of young dancers like Tara and Zachary Hench (technically tentative but emotionally so expressive) and April and Simon Ball. May their tribe increase.