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Cabrioles at dawn
Maina Gielgud returns to Boston Ballet with Giselle
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Some sectors of the ballet world think the 19th century is due for an overhaul. Okay, there are historic ballets that might improve if the princess turned up in combat boots and the supernaturals arrived from Mars in a dream sequence induced by bad cocaine. Giselle is not one of these. Since it has fairly credible characters and a wonderful score by Adolphe Adam that powers a dancing throughline, it deserves to be revisited for itself alone. So it’s good news that Boston Ballet’s production, directed by the company’s one-time director-elect, Maina Gielgud, resists the urge to update.

This is about as traditional a Giselle as you’re likely to see anywhere. Gielgud even restores some of the assets that have gotten excised from the ballet in the interest of modernizing. The tasteful sets and costumes by Peter Farmer, borrowed from the Australian Ballet, where Gielgud first did this revival, suggest the rustic village and neighboring forest. A front curtain depicts a dreamy landscape framed by Greek pillars with a gauze curtain draped around the edges, thus establishing the whole ballet as a kind of theatrical genre painting.

There’s no way to recover the authentic original Giselle, or even to identify the specific contributions of the formative choreographers, Jean Coralli, Jules Perrot, and Marius Petipa. Like all historic ballets, Giselle is a mutable object, shaped by what worked and who danced it, what was forgotten and how new things were pasted in, and a thousand other accidents over time. But there’s a greater degree of consensus about Giselle than there is for other classics; the steps and the music seem as if they could fit together in no other way.

My one reservation about the Boston Ballet production is that it has " romance " but no sex. It’s unfortunate that the contemporary idea of romanticism is so sugary and innocent. The Romantic movement seized the imagination because it included what was forbidden as well as what was morally approved. In Giselle, death, sex, and the unknown determine the main characters’ lives as much as their station in life and their virtue.

Giselle is indeed deceived by a nobleman pretending to be a peasant, and as a spirit she saves him from being punished by her fellow Wilis. But that’s not all there is to the story. I don’t even think the program note’s flowery introduction, " Giselle is a story of unrequited love, " is accurate. The slumming Count Albrecht may (and may not) have deceived Giselle about his true identity but he certainly cares for her, and after her death he mourns her sincerely. And even if we believe that Giselle and all the Wilis are virgins, we shouldn’t assume they’ve never experienced desire. There’s more to this than broken hearts.

Although the story is set, and the steps are carefully stitched onto the score, a lot remains for the dancers’ individual interpretation. Each of the three casts gave me different answers to some of Giselle’s mysteries.

Adriana Suárez and Yury Yanowsky hinted most successfully at the erotic potential — that is, the danger — in the meeting of two social unequals. Suárez may be just a village girl but she’s a sensualist. She enjoys being courted by this stranger with the good manners. Yanowsky’s Albrecht seems the more innocent of the two. He may even imagine giving up his life at court to stay with Giselle. He makes his fatal mistake by reflexively acknowledging his fiancée, Princess Bathilde, when she unexpectedly appears. Not only does he lose Giselle, but when her ghost saves him from the Wilis, he’ll have to return to his old life.

It’s easy to believe a girl as impetuous as Suárez could actually die of shock, and her forgiveness in the second act carries a lingering tragic fervor. Yanowsky danced almost casually in the village, released from the ritual demands of his courtly life. When the Wilis put him through his trial in the forest, he seemed to get tighter, straighter. Maybe more noble. Maybe his experience reforms him.

Larissa Ponomarenko and Gaël Lambiotte made an unlikely pair, both frozen in carefully etched impersonations. Her Giselle seemed passive, acquiescent to her fate. Her smile never changed until she had that weak spell while dancing; then she seemed to age 20 years. Lambiotte’s Albrecht was so conceited, so engrossed in his line and the height of his leg extensions, that he seemed to take it for granted that his beauty alone would win her. In the second act, he seemed to expect her to come to his rescue, and I thought, he may be sad she’s dead but it isn’t going to ruin his life.

Pollyana Ribeiro seemed relentlessly and unconvincingly ingenue-like. In other roles she doesn’t always go for the equation that a small woman has to be coy and helpless. Simon Ball, ardent and delighted in his conquest of this charming, trusting girl, has the confidence granted only to the upper classes. He has no idea of the disaster he’s about to precipitate. His conversion in the second act seems drastic; his sorrow won’t be easily repaired.

Giselle is tempted not just by Albrecht’s physical attractiveness but by his upper-class status. Her would-be boyfriend, the gamekeeper Hilarion, is a constant reminder of the life she’s meant to have. Paul Thrussell made him a clumpy woodsman, maybe not terribly bright but crafty and capable of dogged devotion. Viktor Plotnikov looked more refined but possibly ruthless. Hilarion precipitates the tragedy out of simple jealousy, but also he’s offended by Albrecht’s violation of class distinctions.

You can’t really take account of Giselle without a healthy respect for the supernatural. This production includes the crucial mime scene where Giselle’s mother foretells her death. It’s often reduced to a memo, as directors assume the audience will be bored with it. But Laura Young made my skin crawl as she described the evil spirits ready to claim her daughter. Giselle won’t rest in her grave but will rise and dance with the Wilis in their eternal, demonic mission of revenge. In her vision the Wilis threaten the whole village — it’s not just the lives of young girls that are in jeopardy but the comfortable order in which everyone lives.

Giselle, which premiered in Paris in 1841, has a libretto by the poet and proto-balletomane Théophile Gautier. As translated by the English critic Cyril Beaumont, the " book " represents a ballet fully committed to the romantic period’s fascination with the erotic. The Wilis are jilted girls with an unfulfilled passion for dancing. They hate all men, and they avenge their own betrayals by first seducing their victims, then dancing them to death.

Gautier’s Wilis are quite individual, even international, in their costumes and their dancing, but this is undetectable in the choreography now. In Gielgud’s and most other contemporary productions, the Wilis have become anonymous shades, the perfect corps de ballet, whose technical accomplishment and total togetherness are their attraction. These Wilis don’t seem seductive or evil. It’s not even clear that their encounter with Hilarion ends in his death. After making him jump till he’s exhausted, they sort of push him out of their space and he runs away into the forest. Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis, can stir them to fury with her big leaps and implacable hauteur, but I thought all three women I saw in this role looked stiff rather than commanding.

Probably the main reason ballet companies want to perform Giselle is that it puts them to the test. Its choreography is rigorous and recognizable; the principal dancers have to meet both technical and dramatic challenges. The music helps them, and conductor Jonathan McPhee gives them a spirited first act, with skipping, running rhythms and celebratory ensemble numbers. He slows down the tempo for the second act, sometimes stretching out the phrase to make the dancers use their last ounce of breath.

The thematic musicality of Adam’s score has often been noted. He reminds us of Giselle’s lost happiness when its tune recurs in the mad scene. The musical motif that underlined Albrecht’s courtship is inverted as he lifts her ghost. The duet for Giselle and Albrecht is drawn out on the strings when she emerges from the grave, then becomes jumpy and urgently orchestrated when time is running out. Giselle is playing for time; if she can delay and keep Albrecht dancing till dawn, the Wilis’ power will be broken. The Wilis glide across the space in arabesque, echoing her feverish, hopping circle when she first emerges from the grave. Later, as Albrecht makes his last exertions, he carries Giselle across the floor in the same arabesque and her foot merely touches the ground. The same music is playing, but faster, with a lift in it.

In a way, the whole second act is an inversion of the first. The lively, productive village community is brought to a halt by a process of unsuspecting transgressions. Giselle goes from health in the real world to madness and death. Then, in a cold blue light, the unearthly community of the Wilis spins out its mission — and they’re foiled by something even they can’t control.

Issue Date: February 21-28, 2002
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