|
danceview Commentary |
| Remembering
Fonteyn by Jane
Simpson Long ago, in the days of the wireless, there used to be a feature called ‘Talk yourself out of that’. Panel members would be given a set of preposterous or incriminating circumstances and had instantly to come up with a convincing and innocent explanation. I often think of this when I’m watching Giselle: ‘You are a well-to-do young man who has just become engaged to a rich and beautiful young woman. She and her father are staying with you for the celebrations. One day, on the pretext of an urgent business meeting, you send them out to spend a day in the country on their own. Some hours later they encounter you in a village far from your home. You are wearing cheap and shabby clothes and are obviously well known in the village. Talk yourself out of that!’ So, what does Albrecht say to his prospective father-in-law? Giselle, more than any other ballet, is full of incidents like this. The authors of the libretto —Vernoy de Saint-Georges, Théophile Gautier and Jean Coralli—must be completely mystified if they can look down and see the tangles we get ourselves into as we try to interpret their story. Compared with us they lived in a small, stable world, where every educated person was familiar with the same literature, and where the nuances of social distinctions were second nature. We can argue for days about details whose significance must have been obvious to them, and the ambiguities and puzzles we find in their plot provide work for producers, dancers and audience alike. Some are hardly vital, but others go to the heart of the ballet’s meaning, and production and performance are defined by their chosen solutions. Most importantly, what are we to make of Albrecht? Is he cold and selfish, just amusing himself with Giselle, possibly even thinking in terms of droit de seigneur? Or is he an ardent boy, fallen deeply in love for the first time, and just hoping that things will work out somehow? There have been Albrechts of every shade, from one extreme to the other. The second option lets us like him more, and feel more pity for him, but it’s psychologically shallower and we lose most of the strength of what happens to him in Act ll: if all he was guilty of was youthful thoughtlessness, this experience may have made him grow up but it hasn’t had any profound effect on his character. An Albrecht with a touch of the cad about him may sacrifice the audience’s sympathy to start with, but it gives the dancer far more room for drama—despair, remorse, redemption—in the end. Older dancers, of course, hardly get a choice—it’s very hard to make the spectacle of a thirty-five year old losing his head over a girl half his age look appealing. The question that’s most often been discussed is, why does Giselle die? A fatal stab wound, a weak heart, a broken spirit? Or some combination of all three? Messieurs de Saint-Georges etc really don’t help here. Their libretto tells us that she “falls on the sharp point [of the sword] just as her mother drags her away”; but then the “cruel shocks” of Albrecht’s betrayal added to the effort of her dancing are too much for her, and she dies in her mother’s arms. Markova went along with this, but most others seem to prefer a more definite end. Pavlova was a ‘stabber’ (and had the scar to prove it); Asylmuratova was another, but Tamara Rojo, in her recent performances with the Royal Ballet, signals her Giselle’s weak heart from early in the act. It’s usually the dancer’s choice, except in productions like one by Peter Schaufuss which actually showed the blood from the wound – a horrid idea in a romantic ballet. Does it actually matter how she dies? Without thinking too hard about it, I’ve always assumed that she must kill herself, to account for her being buried in the forest—suicides being denied a grave in the churchyard. Certainly in most productions hers is the only grave to be seen, which lends weight to that argument. But what about Berthe’s story? When she warns Giselle about the dangers of too much dancing, she clearly tells how the Wilis’ victims come accidentally across their graves, implying that they are buried in unexpected places—yet they can’t all have killed themselves, surely? Maybe this is one point better left undetermined: to explain absolutely everything restricts our imaginations and might leave us with the equivalent of a butterfly pinned to a specimen board—beautiful but dead. On a dull night, though, there’s a lot of fun to be had from mentally sorting out some of the more trivial matters. In a powerful performance, most of these probably don’t occur to us; but with a less than gripping cast it’s possible to spend a good part of the evening wondering why nobody in the village recognises Albrecht, how he first saw Giselle, how he comes to have a cottage so conveniently to hand, who the Wilis are, who Myrtha is and why she’s their Queen, and so on. It could take a prologue half the length of the first act properly to explain the story so far, and the best productions are the ones that have found some overall conception which makes everything fall logically into place. Starting from the beginning, how did Albrecht meet Giselle? Does he make a habit of wandering about his country incognito? He must have had an excellent cover story if so—even today the sudden appearance in a small village of a good looking and unattached young man, with no visible means of support, would cause comment. How would he account for his posh accent, and his obviously un-work-toughened hands? I suppose at best he could pass for the son of a successful tradesman, which might just about make him acceptable. Erik Bruhn’s production had Albrecht’s old nurse live in Giselle’s village, so that he’d seen Giselle whilst visiting her one day, but that idea needs us to believe that the old lady wouldn’t have told a soul who he was—too unlikely for me. Each ‘solution’ just raises more questions. One point in the Royal Ballet’s various productions which has always puzzled me is explained by a careful read of the programme notes. Hilarion finally tumbles to Albrecht’s deception when he puts his sword alongside the Duke’s hunting horn and finds that the coats-of-arms match. But why should they? Albrecht and the Duke aren’t related—so far as we know—and their arms would be completely different. All becomes clear, though, when you know that Bathilde and her father are Albrecht’s guests: the hunting horn, and indeed the huntsmen, are Albrecht’s own. It would be nice, though, to find some way of showing this on stage, perhaps by dressing the huntsmen and Wilfrid in the same livery. (Wilfrid is usually ridiculously overdressed anyway, making all Albrecht’s fuss about his disguise a bit pointless.) And that brings me back to my original question – how does Albrecht explain what he’s doing there? The usual airy ‘Oh, just one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas’ gesture doesn’t seem anywhere near adequate. If events hadn’t then moved on so quickly he would have had to come up with something much more convincing, and all explainable in classical mime, of course. The whole hunt scene can look ludicrous if it’s not very carefully produced. The courtiers usually looked dressed for drinks on the castle terrace rather than for riding in the deep forest, and the addition of live dogs—falcons—even a horse, in David Bintley’s recent version—only emphasise the artificiality of it all. The fact that they’re hunting isn’t at all crucial to the plot, and I would much prefer to see something like Peter Darrell’s production for Scottish Ballet, which had Giselle’s mother keeping the local inn and the Duke’s party arriving to taste the new vintage. (Derek Deane tried something on similar lines for English National Ballet, with the action set in a smart hotel where Berthe was the housekeeper, all updated to the 1920’s—it worked quite well till the moment when Albrecht arrived, driven on stage in a gorgeous Rolls Royce, out of which he stepped in tights, carrying a sword—at which all logic entirely disintegrated.) Moving on to Act ll, what do you have to do to get to be a Wili? Going back to the libretto again, they’re described as women who ‘perished from having loved dancing too well, or passed away too early in life to gratify sufficiently that foolish passion’. Nothing there, notice, about dying before their wedding day or having been jilted: so presumably if Giselle had died from over-exerting her weak heart in the dance, before she’d ever met Albrecht, she’d have become a Wili just the same. Dying for love of dancing doesn’t really resonate any more, though—and besides, today’s ghosts would just pile their Wili handbags into their magic circle and dance happily round them till dawn; no men required at all. We need to see the Wilis as victims, working out their vengeance, to get the full emotional charge. Even so, going back to the original explains and illuminates some of the choreography. I hadn’t realised, for instance, that Giselle’s vertiginous spin when Myrthe first removes her veil represents joy—she thought she would have to spend eternity in her grave and she’s suddenly been released. It does seem strange to find a hierarchy amongst the Wilis. How does Myrtha come to be their Queen? Was she the first one to die, or was she a noblewoman in real life who just carried her rank over into the spirit world? Her henchwomen Zulme and Moyna then would have been lesser gentry, perhaps, though I prefer the idea that they earned their promotion by outstanding zeal. And the last question is, what happens to Giselle next? Will she join in happily with the others when the next man strays into the forest, or has Albrecht’s salvation broken the power of the Wilis forever? I can’t resist ending with a slight diversion. Kathrine Sorley Walker once wrote a wonderful description of the Giselle which introduced the story to London: not the ballet, but a play with danced episodes, using Adam’s music with choreography by a Mr Frampton. The Wilis have their own song: O’er
wild and o’er waste, when the moon glimmers bright,
|
|
|
| ©
copyright
1998-2003 by DanceView |
|