Article by:
Luke Jennings
Mary Skeaping’s production of Giselle was commissioned for London Festival Ballet in 1971. Skeaping danced with Pavlova in the 1920s, and in recreating the piece worked closely with Tamara Karsavina, who performed the title role in tsarist St Petersburg. London Festival Ballet became English National Ballet in 1989, and Skeaping’s Giselle remains one of the jewels of the company’s repertoire. Old-fashioned but authentic, it is one of the most atmospheric productions in circulation.
Last year ENB director Tamara Rojo commissioned a new version of Giselle by Akram Khan to take its place alongside Skeaping’s. Dancing both versions has given the company a nuanced understanding of the story and its themes, and they present the older production with engaging sincerity. The corps have been carefully schooled in the 19th-century French Romantic style, as is apparent in their softly rounded arms and restrained line, but a scrappy and unmusical peasant pas de deux (by Aitor Arrieta and Crystal Costa) shows how difficult this is to get right.
The title role is danced by Laurretta Summerscales, who initially appears excessively coy, an affectation at odds with the robust efficiency of her dancing. Her acting clarifies during the first act, and by the time we reach the scene in which Giselle realises that she has been betrayed by her lover, she has found the emotional heart of her character.
The duplicitous Albrecht is danced by Xander Parish, a guest artist from the Mariinsky Ballet. Unlike some interpreters of the role, Parish makes no suggestion that the young aristocrat is merely feckless. Parish’s Albrecht is an unequivocally calculating seducer and faced with Giselle’s distraught collapse, his only thought is for the consequences to himself. Parish conveys all of this through the body language of considerable subtlety. With Summerscales, his dancing is all fluent charm, but at other times a fiercely entitled hauteur reasserts itself. There’s a vicious edge to this Albrecht, as Fabian Reimair’s Hilarion is swift to recognise.
With Giselle’s death, however, Parish’s Albrecht seems to fracture before our eyes, and the character that he builds in Act 2 is both human and deserving of redemption. Summerscales is in full technical and dramatic command by now, and Michaela DePrince (guesting from Dutch National Ballet) makes a strong impression as Myrtha, cleaving the stage space with huge, billowing leaps. But it’s Parish’s performance that you take away with you. The classical purity and authority of his dancing, the tenderness of his partnering, the clarity of his acting: all these are of a very rare order indeed. His final moments with Summerscales, when he begs her forgiveness and she gently bestows it before vanishing forever, are heart-rending.
Professionally, Parish is at a crossroads. From 2005 to 2010 he was a member of the Royal Ballet but was never allowed to dance a solo. Noting his ambition and potential, Mariinsky Ballet director Yuri Fateyev offered him a job, and for six years now Parish has been refining his dancing, and performing principal roles, in St Petersburg. Today Parish is the finest British-born danseur noble on the world stage, and there are signs that he wishes to complete his career in the west.
There would be a happy symmetry if he did so with the Royal, but, dismayingly for his many British fans, a deafening silence issues from Covent Garden on the subject. This looks like pique; the Royal’s underestimation of Parish was a seriously missed trick. That said, Royal director Kevin O’Hare has not been slow to give chances to promising male dancers such as Reece Clark and Calvin Richardson, and may simply have other plans. In the meantime, as so often before, Rojo steals the headlines.
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