Akram Khan’s Giselle is much more than a tale of a jilted peasant girl. If you think you know Giselle from its classical nineteenth century incarnation, Heine, Gautier, Rhineland peasant wine festival celebrations, ghostly Slavic Wilis, music by Adolphe Adam, think again. Kathak and contemporary dance (act one) marry with Classical (act two is on pointe).
It is a grey, murky dystopia from the very beginning. No jolly peasant dancing in the first half. And does it chime with the times, more so now than in 2016, when it premièred. More so than when seen at Sadler’s Wells in 2017 and 2019, when I saw, and still see, H G Wells and Margaret Atwood in its prescient projections. Picasso’s Guernica also springs to mind—are we regressing?
To that dividing wall with its desperate handprints, now we can bring the COVID memorial wall opposite the Houses of Parliament, the metaphorical wall that Russia is erecting against the West, underground shelters and many other global conflicts that flit across our screens. We are living in alarming times.
From the first ominous sounds of a distant ‘thunder’—Vincenzo Lamagna’s dramatic cinematic score with its tense silences bears little of Adolphe Adam in the first half—lit darkly by Mark Henderson, a forgotten band of workers, costumes uniformly ashen, struggle to exist in a disused factory.
Their ‘foreman’, Hilarion, is in the pay of the overdressed Landlords, who occasionally pay a visit for their grotesque entertainment. A klaxon sounds. The concrete wall rotates to let them into this hellhole, where their expendable former garment workers barely survive.
Tim Yip’s exaggerated costumes illustrate their delusional self-importance, never mind the cost of their glamour at the expense of discarded others. But, one of theirs, Albrecht, has fallen in love with Giselle…
He is found out, she is killed by Hilarion at the Landlord’s command, can’t have any upset to the established order, and cowardly Albrecht skulks away. Will the Wilis get their revenge in the second half? Well, we know from the original that Giselle defends and protects him, undeserving though he seems to be. Hilarion, of course, is not worthy of saving.
So, two bleak, bleached of colour, halves, mirrors of each other, shadows on the walls, repetitive (a sense of a conveyor belt at times), animalistic tribal prancing, a herd of deer galloping across the space or a rite of survival, this Giselle would be primeval if not for Giselle’s saving grace. And Albrecht’s final redemption…
Erina Takahashi (Giselle) and James Streeter (Albrecht), partners in real life, break the heart in their despairingly tender duet. Their act two grief at having to part forever in the face of her ‘second’ death, hands stroking faces, is painfully poignant. Those who have lost loved ones will know that devastating feeling.
Streeter has made this role his own, but I’ve only seen him dance it with Tamara Rojo. To see him dance with his wife is something else. Takahashi brings a steely fragility to the role.
Ken Saruhashi excels as a contorting Hilarion, selling out for the bowler hat of power, bending this way and that, whilst Emma Hawes is commanding as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis. Amazing that this slight fragile Giselle is prepared to stand up to her on her newly pointe shoe shod feet. The power of love.
The whole company shines in its intensity. The orchestra under the baton of Maria Seletskaja—I am sitting only three rows away—ups the drama as if rising from the underworld, where Albrecht is now all alone—on the wrong side of that wall. A traditional Romantic ballet, Giselle, is transmogrified in a telling scenario.