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‘I thought I looked too healthy to play her,” says Miyako Yoshida of her debut in Giselle, back in the 90s, when she was a vibrant, strong young dancer asked to play the part of the sweet village girl with a weak heart. “But from the first time I came on stage, I could just live her,” she says; she simply became Giselle. Yoshida is not the only dancer, or audience member, or ballet critic, to fall in love with this 19th-century peasant girl. “It was always my favourite,” says English National Ballet’s Erina Takahashi, “emotionally you can explore yourself in such a wide range.” “It’s a perfect ballet choreographically,” according to veteran dancer Alessandra Ferri.
Giselle is almost the oldest ballet heroine to still grace the stage, created in 1841 by librettist Théophile Gautier, choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, and a young star ballerina of the day Carlotta Grisi. Through the decades the character has inspired legendary performances from some of the world’s best ballerinas: Galina Ulanova, Natalia Makarova, and more recently a startling interpretation from Natalia Osipova.
The story centres on open-hearted Giselle who has fallen deeply in love with Albrecht, not knowing that he is actually a nobleman (and betrothed to boot) who is on holiday from responsibility and only pretending to be a fellow peasant. When she discovers his betrayal, Giselle descends into madness, and depending on which version you watch, either dies of a broken heart, or stabs herself with Albrecht’s sword. The second act shifts from sunny pastorale to ghostly woods and the vengeful wilis, the spirits of jilted women who force men to dance themselves to death. They’re gunning for Albrecht, except that Giselle’s love for him is so enduring that she saves him. It’s a rich role for a ballerina, from girlish to deranged to otherworldly all in one night. “You die for your soul to be free, so you learn how one should love,” Ferri told a meeting of the London Ballet Circle recently. “When you are able to dance from that profundity, the ballet is eternal.”
The ballet is as popular as ever, performed by major ballet companies around the world. One of those, National Ballet of Japan, under Yoshida’s direction, is bringing their version to London this summer. It’s also been repeatedly reinvented. Mats Ek’s version took place in an asylum, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s in a Louisiana plantation. In Akram Khan’s award-winning 2016 production, a huge hit for English National Ballet (it tours to Taiwan in May), Giselle and her fellow “villagers” are migrant factory workers, trapped in poverty behind the set’s huge domineering wall.
Another reimagining of Giselle is about to debut in London made by two artists who had never actually seen the ballet before they decided to make the show. Swiss theatre director François Gremaud was simply looking for a ballet with its heroine’s name in the title, having made a successful piece based on Racine’s Phèdre (he completed the trilogy with operatic heroine Carmen). But in the end, “we fell in love with the ballet, and I must say, with the character,” says Gremaud. His partner in the production is Dutch dancer Samantha van Wissen, known for her work with Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker – austere, rigorous contemporary dance that’s worlds away from floaty Romantic ballet. The work they have made, Giselle..., showing as part of the Dance Reflections festival, is a deconstruction of the ballet, with van Wissen explaining the story, the scenery, the historical context, and playing all the characters.
For Gremaud, it’s about revisiting the work and trying to give a modern take. “Ballet has greatly constrained the female body, not least because it was a masculine projection of the feminine ideal,” he says. “In our show, we wanted to tell the story of the original ballet very faithfully, with respect, and at the same time make a real contemporary gesture by putting on stage a performer who is absolutely free. Samantha improvises her dances every night.”
In the research, Gremaud and van Wissen watched videos of multiple productions, but their favourite was American Ballet Theatre’s from 1977, with Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov. “It goes beyond technique,” says van Wissen. “You really see, through the movement, the love between those people. It made a link to my work with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, where she always said: ‘It starts from the movement.’ You don’t add too much theatricality, the movement speaks enough.” It was revelatory for van Wissen. “I never thought I could be touched like this by a classical ballet.”
Gremaud says great theatrical characters stand the test of time when they represent universal ideas. For Giselle, that’s unconditional love. “She places love above everything, above revenge, even her own death,” he says. It’s not very feminist though, is it? Unconditional love for someone who treats you badly. “Some have interpreted Giselle as a submissive woman,” Gremaud admits. “But in the second act she really takes control. She’s the one who acts, and it’s thanks to her that Albrecht survives. So she can also, I think, be seen as a strong woman who stands up for what she believes is right.”
Takahashi danced the leading role in Khan’s version and saw the character recast in a more 21st-century light, but still sees the same woman at heart. “Classical Giselle is quite vulnerable,” she says, “and Akram’s Giselle might look strong, she’s the leader of the group, but I think inside she has the same sensitivity. She’s also very open, she’s a positive person, and when tragedy comes, that really hurts.” Giselle continues to be an inspiration, 184 years on. “It’s a piece of genius,” says choreographer Sally Marie, who is working on an idea for a “Fuck-you feminist sci-fi punk version of Giselle”, yet one she says will be “still filled with the innocence and the longing for love”.
Gremaud found other connections with the present, looking at how the Romantic movement was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution. “They were fighting against the way we were treating nature,” he says. “They were artists who were angry with their world. And the world they were afraid of is the world in which we are living today.” For van Wissen, it’s more of a personal bond. Last summer she finally went to see the ballet Giselle live for the first time, at the Paris Opera. “I felt so connected to her,” she says. “I had tears in my eyes the whole time.”
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Giselle... is at the Linbury theatre, Royal Opera House, London, 15-16 March, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.
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National Ballet of Japan performs Giselle at the Royal Opera House, London, 24-27 July (booking opens 19 March).
