A new ‘Giselle’
Modernising a great classical ballet Page
You have to salute English National Ballet director Tamara Rojo’s sheer experimental spirit in asking choreographer Akram Khan to create a new Giselle for her company, not to mention his for taking up the daunting challenge. This 1841 piece is the pinnacle of Romantic ballet, and Wimbledon-born Khan, although a master in Indian Kathak and Western contemporary dance, has little or no practical experience of classical ballet. Beyond, that is, his and ENB’s (super, shorter) 2014 collaboration, Dust, which wove his and the dancers’ training into an immensely stirring and satisfying new whole.
Where the original Giselle’s account of a duplicitous count (Albrecht) in love with the titular peasant girl plays out in the Rhineland in the Middle Ages, Khan here reimagines their romance as being between one of the rich “Landlords” and a member of a disenfranchised community of migrant workers from some now-defunct branch of the garment industry. It’s a clever and painfully topical new twist, in a piece that impresses in many ways.
As with Dust, it’s fascinating to see Khan’s physical instincts channelled through those fabulous ENB dancers’ ballet-honed bodies: they clearly relish the hybrid movement vocabulary that has emerged here, and bring a startling attack to their performance. Highest marks go to Alina Cojocaru’s sweetly intense Giselle and Cesar Corrales’s electrifying Hilarion (here not a woodcutter but a shady “fixer”), but Isaac Hernández’s Albrecht holds the attention expertly, too, and there is also some stupendous dancing in the corps. My eye was also drawn to Crystal Costa, as one of Giselle’s friends, for her beguiling combination of bounce, musicality and crisp technique.
Meanwhile, Oscar-winning designer Tim Yip (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame) backs the entire, smokefilled stage – and bisects the worlds of the migrants and Landlords – with a 20ft-high wall. Subtle, it ain’t, but it does the divisive job – in a strikingly Hunger Games kind of way – and also yields some impressive coups de théâtre. Yip’s costumes, meanwhile, are suitably frayed for the migrants, magnificent beyond belief for the Landlords. When the latter, dazzlingly backlit, stride forth among the migrants, they seem creatures from another world every bit as much as the aliens at the climax of Spielberg’s Close Encounters, with Begoña Cao cutting a mesmerisingly icy figure as Albrecht’s intended, Bathilde.
However, where a traditional Giselle enjoys a plot and setting of complete focus and self-explanatory simplicity, the new scenario feels woolly: it’s all there in the programme notes, but is it actually there on stage? I’m not so sure, and it’s distracting, for example, to be left scratching your head at the end of Act I, wondering exactly how Giselle has just met her end.
The show’s other problem is one of dynamics. For one thing, Vincenzo Lamagna’s score (which reworks snippets from Adolphe Adam’s original music) has one modus operandi: start, crescendo for a while, stop. As a result, it’s remarkably flat-footed, tantalising you with those ghosts of Adam’s effervescent and dramatic music, and leaving the entire work struggling to unleash any real shocks.
For another, although Mark Henderson’s lighting is never less than ravishing and supremely atmospheric, he, Khan et al crucially fail to differentiate the two acts sufficiently. The complete contrast between acts I (earthy, boisterous) and II (moonlit, magical) is virtually the entire point of a traditional Giselle. Here, for all the subtle variations and the second half ’s menacing “ghost factory” setting, the whole show feels monotonously sombre, noirish, overcast.
As a result, this Giselle, while a banquet for the eyes, yields only modest fodder for the heart: for all her commitment, Cojocaru never gets the chance to wring the emotions that regular versions have so often given her. It’s a brave, considered and commendable stab at something new, and it was rapturously received at its premiere in Manchester. But the original’s still the one that haunts.
‘It’s distracting to be left scratching your head at the end of Act I, wondering how Giselle has just met her end’
Until October 1 (tickets: 0844 871 3019), then touring. Details: ballet.org.uk