Mesmerising ballet sure to take tears from a stone
FROM the moment the curtain comes up on Akram Khan’s retake of the classic ballet Giselle, it is clear this was not going to be a traditional, tutu-laden flit through the landscape of the original tale.
Opening this year’s Dublin Dance Festival, the production is a powerful and intense reworking of the 19th century story of love, betrayal and redemption that gave the audience an uncomfortable peek into the disturbing world of the ‘outcasts’.
An emotive opening sequence sees members of the 40-strong company of the English National Ballet doggedly push in vain against a wall dividing the outcasts — disenfranchised garment factory workers — from the ‘landlords’ of industry, all to a haunting score composed by Vincenzo Lamagna and performed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. I was transfixed.
In this moving and current reimagining, choreographer and director Khan draws a connection between Manchester’s global textile industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Bangladesh, the birthplace of his own parents and now home to thousands of manufacturing sweatshops, illuminating the harsh reality of life for economic migrants separated from the first world by metaphoric ‘walls’ of inequality.
Giselle, played on the night I attented by Erina Takahashi, and her community are exiled from their homeland and are desperately attempting to scale the wall for a better life.
Albrecht, (James Streeter) — one of this wealthy class and already engaged to aristocrat Bathilde — is in love with the beautiful Giselle and pretends to be an outcast so as to be close to her. Hilarion (Oscar Chacon), also in love with Giselle and jealous of her feelings for Albrecht, is a ‘fixer’, moving between both sides of the wall for his own personal gain and to help his downtrodden community.
Convinced Albrecht is not what he seems and determined to separate the lovers, he participates in the demise of the affair until Bathilde discovers the truth.
Faced with a choice between a life of privilege or the outcasts’ existence, Albrecht abandons Giselle returning to his former life. Broken-hearted, Giselle is driven mad and meets an untimely end.
A spectacular opening to the second act gives us no reprieve from the intensity, as the ethereal and vengeful Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis (Stina Quagebeur), drags the dead Giselle on stage, en pointe, awakening her to a new, spectral reality. As Giselle defies Myrtha’s order to kill the now repentant Albrecht, he is left standing, forlorn and alone, staring at the wall he can no longer scale.
Mesmerising and lyrical choreography produced a flow of movement that even managed to evoke the image of an industrial loom.
Deeply moving and exquisitely performed, as much an experience as a spectacle.