Article by:
David Jays
This is an inspired piece of curation. English National Ballet follows their production of Akram Khan’s incendiary new version of Giselle with a historically attentive staging of the 1841 ballet. This cherished version dates from 1971 when Mary Skeaping returned to original sources and descaled the score. It’s fascinating to see old and new worry away at the same questions of love in a perilous culture.
If Khan distills a baleful version of our present, Skeaping restored the original’s complex nostalgia – a pre-industrial pastoral in which people are fixed by birth and corralled by superstition. In David Walker’s richly picturesque designs, the Schloss looks down on the autumnal Rhineland village through a blue and green landscape; later, a woodland graveyard gathers darkness at dead of night.
The orchestra digs into the swirl of Adam’s overture, announcing that we’re set for tragedy. Giselle – loved but betrayed by aristocratic Albrecht, wooing her in disguise – is Alina Cojocaru’s signature role. Unlike the stubborn heroine she created for Khan, here she’s all fragility. It’s a beautifully acted performance – she shows a secret adoring smile, turns aside in a crease of anxiety. And sublimely danced: one foot is better than two; airborne best of all. She doesn’t flaunt technique – this Giselle hops like a little girl who enjoys hopping, even as her ankles achieve a hummingbird shimmer.
In this ballet, even a silly game with a daisy becomes fraught with foreboding. (He loves me … not?) Giselle is already fathomed deep in love, and we see Albrecht falling. The young duke often seems merely a thoughtless charmer toying with the peasantry, but Isaac Hernández makes him loving in his way. He grows too late into care and offers his soaring jumps as a lover’s gift. When Cojocaru understands that Albrecht is already status-appropriately engaged, she seems to age 100 years. When she dies, he looks desolate in a loss.
The chilly Wilis – spirits of other betrayed women – inhabit a woodland choked with mist. Sadness is their superpower, heads downcast but feet stabbing on pointe like daggers, moving in inexorable formation like graveyard angels. It’s as if their tears have calcified into vengeance.
Cojocaru’s ghostly Giselle isn’t quite ready to join the glamorous, implacable undead – but she moves with exquisite deliberation as if the air around her were heavy with sighs. She protects Albrecht: Hernández begins his solo heavy with dread, but then leaps with desperate bravura, a man dancing for his life.
If some performances were more clean than characterful, ENB casts the work in depth. Laurretta Summerscales and Cesar Corrales will play the leading roles at future performances. On opening night, Corrales ignited firecracker leaps in his peasant pas de deux, while Summerscales made an outstanding queen of the Willis, with her marmoreal glide and uncanny swoop. Fernando Bufalá found both nasty pleasure and inconsolable remorse in the spurned Hilarion.
As she burrowed into the ballet’s history, Skeaping fastened on the emotional clasp that keeps it current. People stumble into misplaced hope, insensitive impulse. That they also find their way to redemption feels immense.
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