DANCE AND THE CITY
At Luminato, ‘monumental’ lives up to its name while the National Ballet presents Giselle,
Unimpressed with first look in 1945, choreographer Peter Wright has made it his own For a man who claims to have been bored silly the first time he saw Giselle, Sir Peter Wright has certainly come around largely because, in the intervening decades, the celebrated British choreographer and director has reshaped the Romantic era classic to his liking.
Wright’s much lauded production of Giselle, staged for the National Ballet of Canada in 1970 and often revived, returns this week.
The British knight, 89, was here in mid-May to make sure it had lost none of its dramatic impact. “When I first saw Giselle in London, I think it was 1945, I was not very impressed,” Wright said. “I couldn’t believe in the characters at all.”
Twenty years later, when Wright was working as ballet master in Stuttgart, Germany, he was more or less bullied into taking his first run at Giselle by that ballet company’s artistic director, John Cranko.
“John felt it was important to do a new Giselle because the previous production was pretty awful and he was too busy to stage it himself,” Wright said.
“I explained I’d never danced in it and really didn’t much care for it anyway, but John insisted and gave me six months leave to research and prepare a new version.”
Wright’s first Giselle in Stuttgart was an immediate success. Soon he was being asked to stage it elsewhere. To date, he has staged 15 productions for companies all over the world. As he elaborates in Wrights and Wrongs, his deliciously gossipy memoir soon to be published by Oberon, Wright said he’s never got bored with it in the 50 years since that first Stuttgart production.
“There are still questions that intrigue me. Some aspects you can nev- er totally resolve. The important thing is to try.”
Giselle was first presented in Paris in 1841 although most of the traditional versions we see today derive from a much later production staged in Russia by the French-born ballet master Marius Petipa. The title character is a lovely young woman in a medieval Rhineland village torn between two suitors.
There’s the ardent Hilarion, a local lad favoured by Giselle’s mother, and a somewhat mysterious newcomer who has completely captured the girl’s heart. The problem is that this
“When I first saw Giselle in London, I think it was 1945, I was not very impressed. I couldn’t believe in the characters at all.” SIR PETER WRIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER
fellow who passes himself off as peasant Loys is in fact Albrecht, the young Duke of Silesia, sowing his wild oats ahead of an arranged marriage.
Said Wright: “He’s a cad, a randy young man from the castle out for a good time.”
When the suspicious Hilarion confirms and exposes Albrecht’s duplicity Giselle loses it, grabs Albrecht’s sword and dies.
In some versions Giselle is said to die of a broken heart but, as Wright points out, even if that’s possible it probably takes longer than two or three minutes of running around onstage.
For him, it’s dramatically crucial that Giselle actually stabs herself. It must be a suicide, a mortal sin in those far-off days, otherwise there’s no plausible reason why she’d be buried in unhallowed ground out in the forest, the necessary dramatic pretext for Act II.
It’s there, so local legend goes, that in the dark of night scary spirits called Wilis, a ghostly sorority of jilted maidens, rise up at the command of their queen and exact revenge by preying on any man unlucky enough to cross their path.
This includes the worthy Hilarion, who in Wright’s view is rather unfairly danced to death, and then the remorseful Albrecht, who is saved a similar fate by Giselle’s intercession.
Some of Wright’s theories about Giselle cannot easily be staged but do make sense of the ballet’s dramatic conundrums. Why, for example, does Giselle seem so different in poise and demeanour from her peasant companions? Why is Giselle’s mother so suspicious of this stranger who’s after her daughter?
With no father in sight Wright muses that perhaps Giselle is illegitimate, the fruit of an earlier aristocratic dalliance in the village with her own mother. Wright even suggests that Giselle could be pregnant, which explains her why her mother is so re- luctant to let her indulge her love of dancing.
For Wright, staging Giselle marked a significant career shift, away from original choreography toward very successful productions of the great 19th-century classics. He attributes his success in this to the generally eclectic nature of his career.
Wright was a teenage runaway when his stern Quaker father tried to thwart his ambition to be a dancer. As a late starter he initially found more interest in modern dance than classical ballet. And to pay the rent he worked in many mediums: film, television, stage musicals, opera.
With wide experience such as this you learn what works and doesn’t work, and above all how to hold an audience’s attention. If there’s one thing Wright is fearful of it’s boring an audience. In his mind that’s an unforgivable theatrical sin. Giselle is at the Four Seasons Centre, 145 Queen St. W., Wednesday to Sunday; national.ballet.ca or 416-345-9595.