by Leigh Witchel
Akram Khan’s “Giselle” has returned to the U.S. It toured to Chicago in 2019 before the pandemic; this engagement at BAM was a victory lap for English National Ballet’s director Tamara Rojo before she takes the reins at San Francisco Ballet.
Revisiting the work, its strengths haven’t changed: powerful group work and gripping performances from Rojo, Jeffrey Cirio and Stina Quagebeur as Giselle, Hilarion and Myrtha. Unfortunately, the weaknesses – murky lighting and murky dramaturgy, are still there.
The work started with a low rumble opening in a hostile environment: unhappy peasants who were displaced workers at a closed factory (the synopsis calls them Outcasts), pushing at a pitted concrete wall that looked like the Berlin Wall, except with Blair Witch hand prints.
One ballet convention that works is how to introduce the main characters. Albrecht has an entrance. So does Giselle. It may have seemed too heroic for this staging, but it quickly lets the audience know that’s who this story is about. Here, both Albrecht and Giselle are within the crowd, wearing the same outfits as the corps and it takes you time to find them. It made a didactic point but was a nightmare for clarity. You need the synopsis to know who’s who and what’s what. The information was often onstage, but transmitted unclearly, too quickly, or competing with other information: Blink and you’ll miss it. One helpful hint – Albrecht’s shirt is tucked in, every other man’s is not.
Both Giselle and Albrecht, played by Isaac Hernández, once revealed, made an open-palmed gesture that was very important, but again, it happened once, with other things going on. It’s one of many things that made sense to Khan and the dramaturg, Ruth Little, but wasn’t as clear as they thought. At least Rojo has star quality. You quickly knew who she was. Hilarion started contorting; Giselle avoided him. Again, this was quickly done amidst a whirl of other activity. Blink and you’ll miss it.
The most thrilling sections were done as a group, often in unison. The Outcasts started sweeping back and forth to the sound of hammering metal. Rojo led the women in beats. The music by Vincenzo Lamagna took themes from Adolphe Adam’s score for the original ballet and sampled, repeated or distorted them. Hilarion fronted the men in a dance taking a theme from the Act 2 music when Albrecht is being danced to death.
There were very few choreographic quotes from the original, one early on was a pinwheel formation that happened at about the same point in both ballets. In Act 2, the famous traveling arabesques were inserted, but felt like a quote for a quote’s sake.
Khan and Little’s work didn’t prioritize character development for the leads: There were no mime scenes, so Albrecht and Giselle were less often alone, but also supporting characters were pared out – Wilfrid, Berthe – who not only advance the plot, but tell you something about Giselle and Albrecht. Khan and Little lifted a moment from Act 2 of “Swan Lake” where Siegfried searched for Odette among the other identical swans. Here, when Albrecht can’t tell which girl is Giselle, that’s the libretto both being unclear and stacking the deck against Albrecht didactically and mercilessly.
Giselle and Albrecht have one long duet in the act, beginning with Giselle fitting her hand into the prints on the wall. Giselle touched Albrecht’s face, and put his hand on the prints. He tried to kiss her, but she avoided him. He knelt, then carried her. The music seemed to echo the Act 1 bench scene in the original. It was a love duet, and Rojo could make sense of it. Hernández sort-of could, but Albrecht remained a cipher. It did not help that this all happened in the dark. Mark Hendersons’s lighting was murky, which worked for the atmosphere and against the story. We needed to see faces and acting.
At the climax of the duet, Albrecht lifted Giselle to the highest print, still only halfway up the wall. A horrible klaxon noise sounded. Hilarion appeared and the wall opened up, revealing wealthy people in various outfits from different fantastic or historical periods. Hilarion was handed a bowler hat, a symbol of being between the classes, exploiting the poor and being exploited by the rich.
As in the original, Giselle touched Bathilde’s dress. Bathilde slowly and impassively offered her a single glove as a useless gift, adding to the insult by dropping it to the ground. She was a cuckoo clock caricature of a rich bitch. The rich were wealthy, selfish, and cruel; characters E. M. Forster would think of as flat rather than round. There was no subtlety at all. In its own way, that was as unrealistic about class and character as the traditional version and more objectifying. Why make the main Landlord, Bathilde’s father, an imaginary figure from feudal times instead working in-period and making him a Victorian industrialist, bent on progress through profit? Why not dig into the complexity? Rojo’s character was round, not flat, but that could have been Rojo more than the production. Hilarion tried to get Giselle to bow her head; she refused, and returned Bathilde’s glove with dignity.
So many things weren’t clear by watching. There was was no way to know that Albrecht was deceiving Giselle about who he was except by reading the synopsis. He wasn’t dressed particularly differently and had no servant or signs of wealth. If he were deceiving Giselle, he would have been found out when the Landlord and Bathilde appeared. Why didn’t he react?
The dancing made more sense. There were still reasons to be thrilled with individual and collective performances. An exciting dance for the men holding their hands above their heads like stags’ antlers was done to a snatch of music originally closing a scene in Act 1.
Albrecht had disappeared, but reappeared and joined in the dance. Bathilde came towards him as did the Landlord. Hilarion and Albrecht came into conflict. Hilarion tried to get Albrecht to wear the bowler hat, but Albrecht objected and threw it down. Cirio danced Hilarion full out and more, throwing himself into animalistic combinations. He understood the cockiness of an incensed man, brushing off his shoulders before pushing Albrecht.
In the midst of all this activity Khan and Little set several important plot points: Giselle rebuffed Hilarion’s advances. Albrecht confronted Bathilde and acknowledged her father. Bathilde went toward Giselle but snubbed her by walking past. Blink and you’ll miss all of these moments. Khan and Little sketched so much information that they didn’t know how to make register.
Bathilde came to Albrecht, and Giselle tried to make him come back to her, putting her hand on her stomach to let him know she was pregnant. It was one of the few narrative moments that was slow enough and told in enough light to register. And still there were questions. Was Albrecht deceiving Giselle or did she always know there was another woman and this was the showdown?
Bathilde and the Landlord stood until Albrecht rejected Giselle by getting up and letting her fall to the ground. In an awful moment, he ignored her crawling towards him. Whether it was Hernández or Khan and Little, Albrecht came off as a weak, characterless dick – if you could read anything into him at all. Why shouldn’t he be reprehensible? If he was, what did it say about Giselle that she would defend him even after death? For the story, and Giselle’s own strength, to make sense, Albrecht has to be worth saving.
As Giselle’s theme played on high woodwind notes sampled and repeated, Rojo launched into a version of Giselle’s mad scene. Rojo was on the ground, flopping, looking at her hands, spinning wildly. The original version’s concept of a village of friends would have helped – no one noticed Giselle suffer, but they did surround and pick her up. She knelt at the center of the group, as they began to gallop wildly, circling and then crossing the stage.
The information for what actually happened at the end of Act 1 was there, but blink and you’ll miss it. The Landlord appeared and Hilarion reappeared from the darkness and came towards Giselle. If you looked for it you could see him embrace her, but the Landlord and a crowd deliberately blocked what happened next. When they cleared, a man was holding Giselle’s body and she was dead. It’s Hilarion. In 2019, I thought it was Albrecht. This time, the person next to me did. The stage was dark: Hilarion and Albrecht were wearing the same color costume and they had the same color hair.
The sinister wall rotated and rotated to end the act. This version might be easier to comprehend if you didn’t know the traditional story. The production was consistently willing to sacrifice clarity for thrilling effects.
Act 2 started with another stunning visual: the wall horizontal like a platform with Hilarion sitting there. It felt like a dividing level between the underworld and the living. On the stage, in the dark, Albrecht was angrily confronting the wealthy Landlords. The rich folk stared at him impassively, then left. Bathilde stayed and took hold of him. He pushed by and left. It was too little, too late both from him and the stagers: underdone, and again, you couldn’t see it.
The production’s reimagining of the wilis made up for a multitude of sins. That began with a coup de théâtre. Quagebeur, who originated the part, dragged Giselle’s inert body onstage while traveling on pointe. Lamagna reinstrumented Adam’s music for Myrtha as if played by a consort of viols.
Quagebeur bourréed and rotated. The pointe work was very simple, and all the women wore (un)dead shoes. Quagebeur made it expressive through her articulation, managing to make the walks and bourrées look different from each other. The staging relied on a brilliant, simple prop: long, slender rods that looked as if they were made of bamboo. Quagebeur took a rod and lowered it into Rojo’s mouth. Rojo, also now on pointe, moved slowly around in this strange, new environment, the stick in her mouth seeming to sense her surroundings like the whiskers of a cat or fish.
The klaxon sounded and all the women gathered with sticks for a dance in unison, again nothing more than bourrées, but so is the pointe work in “Les Noces.” It didn’t need more to be arresting and frightening. The wall rotated down; the wilis piled their sticks on Rojo’s back as Hilarion crawled down the wall.
Myrtha blocked Hilarion from Giselle when he tried to go after her. An interesting question for each of us to decide that we don’t need the production to answer explicitly: Is she protecting Giselle specifically because of what happened or is she a kind of cosmic police officer? Hilarion grabbed and assaulted Giselle, reenacting what we could not see before, and would make no sense if you couldn’t figure the earlier scene out. He then strangled her.
The klaxon sounded again and revenge came quickly. Myrtha claimed Giselle and took her away, turning on Hilarion with a hiss. Her hands flickered and waved. A circle of women surround him, with a line at the back blocking his escape. The music became industrial hammering.
He was done for. The women slowly raised their sticks.
WHAM.
Cirio went rigid and fell in that position to the ground as if they had slammed straight into his heart. He tried to climb away, but every pound of the sticks seemed to weaken him. Myrtha pinioned him and finally the wilis crawled him back into darkness to his fate. It was terrifying and Cirio embodied that terror in an amazing performance.
Just as in the traditional version, Albrecht appeared almost immediately after Hilarion’s death. He tried to go to Giselle. Myrtha blocked him and gave Giselle her stick; where she once once protecting her now she was egging her on to murder. She tried to push Giselle to make the killing blow, but Giselle wouldn’t do it. The whole time Albrecht did not resist, but knelt in repentance. The production finally allowed him to have some character.
Myrtha was stunned and backed away. Albrecht tried to go to Giselle and touch her cheek, but he was as wounded as she. To a theme derived from the adagio in Act 2 played on solo cello, he let Giselle touch his face. The slow, mournful duet became more complicated. Giselle flopped about in his arms; Albrecht was dancing with a corpse; like Eurydice, someone he would never get back. The oboe finally joined the cello, and the music approached the original.
Myrtha came back with the rod; Giselle protected Albrecht. He fell to his knees; Myrtha tried to strike. Giselle took the rod, put it in between herself and Myrtha, womb to womb, and they rotated, disappearing slowly to the back with the palms open gesture from the opening of the work. This is where Hernández and Rojo did the work the stagers didn’t, to become people who could repent and forgive. The ambivalence of the palm-open gesture was interesting, but one small gesture was too little to hold all the implications of forgiveness.
Albrecht headed to the wall, which had come down. He touched and pushed it as the Outcasts did in the beginning. The music rose, he fell to the ground and watched as the wall receded. On a resolving chord you could barely hear (I couldn’t in 2019) the set faded to black.
It’s easy money to bet Rojo brings the production with her to San Francisco, where it will be adored. The visual concepts of the production were stunning, and Rojo at age 48 gave a performance that was close to miraculous.
Still, if you love “Giselle,” this version doesn’t. Is it actually a story about class and the group, or about economic inequality? It’s not, it’s a love story, and one that isn’t told well or clearly. The team knew how to make a dance, but not how to tell a story.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Akram Khan’s Giselle” – English National Ballet
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY
June 11, 2022
Cover: English National Ballet in “Akram Khan’s Giselle.” Photo © Laurent Liotardo.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here.
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
