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Reviews

A Giselle Half-Scored

by Isobel Houghton
copyright © 2001 by Isobel Houghton
Autumn 2001

I’ve been pondering why, for me at least, Guillem’s Giselle for La Scala was such a totally unaffecting production, a failur—an honorable one, but a failure nonetheless. Guillem is unequivocally a magnificent artist, her intentions valid, intelligent, well rounded and the product of knowing the ballet from the inside out and the outside in. In trying to find an answer, I have had to move beyond the obvious tack of drawing comparisons between this and traditional productions, and analyze what Giselle as a ballet means to me, and look at it both dramatically and historically.

Leaving aside the technical capabilities of La Scala, (it was obvious that this company was at Covent Garden under the auspices of the Guillem name. This is not a criticism, stars have had a long tradition of guaranteeing companies bookings on the back of their glamour), this was still a Giselle that was half-cooked and half scored.

Much is made of the two acts of Giselle, the physical versus the temporal, corporal against spiritual. But it is more than this. Structurally Giselle is an innovative masterpiece of style and form, marrying disparate theatre styles under one banner. The first act is an almost perfect example of classical tragedy in form and content. The downfall of a great man/woman which is inevitable from the start, yet unavoidable. This downfall usually includes a fall of grace from God, and indeed Giselle’s suicide and the classical notion of this being a prerequisite for damnation fits this mould. However, the second act is actually quite innovative in that it allows the damned protagonists of the first act to seek and gain redemption. It is in the romantic form to be true, and the concept of the redeeming nature of love is a romantic one, yet love is an eternal concept in drama. The two acts are marked by light and dark, good and evil, a non-descript peasant hamlet the corporal, light, a day in high summer, and a generic woodland night scene. Guillem seemed to intentionally reverse the concept of lighting in both acts. The first act was a Giselle by Breughel, the mad scene underlit to the point where facial features and reactions were almost imperceptible (and I was sitting in the stalls), whereas the second act with its redemptive love was bathed in blue light. As a means of establishing a sense of pathetic fallacy with the theme of each act this was valid, yet detracted from the true genius of the dramatic impact of Giselle, the dance. For Giselle is almost a Christ-like figure rejoicing in her love through dance.

Now to the score. Giselle is blessed with Adam’s genius. It is as detailed as a libretto. The music tells the drama. In his pioneering use of the leitmotif Adam predated the work of Wagner by almost thirty years. Moreover, it is a perfectly contained work in its own right. As music to a two-act ballet is doesn’t have the wallpaper requirements that Tchaikovsky, say, had to compose for court dances, variations etc etc. Part of the key to making a great Giselle is the ability to open oneself to the music, letting the music live and tell the tale. However, Guillem seemed to have demanded that the score be conducted at a lightning pace. In her production Guillem strives for verité by cutting the choreography to its bare bones in order to give prominence to the drama. However, she does this by castrating the one great help that anyone wishing to reinvent Giselle could possibly hope for—the music. It is here that I will take issue with certain of La Scala dancers. Massimo Murru was an Albrecht of wood-like charisma. Was he or Francesco Ventriglia listening to the music as the revelation of Albrecht’s aristocratic roots was being played out in a singularly underwhelming fashion?

Now, the essential question of the character of Giselle. Let’s face it. Giselle in act one is not the sharpest tool in the box. She is the personification of innocence, a creature consecrated to love. She is a child with a child’s comprehension of what it is to love. One can say that she loves unconditionally, yet this is not true. Unconditional implies an awareness of what those conditions imposed might be. She loves innocently, and there lies the true crime of Albrecht-–he kills innocence, and he does so knowingly. Albrecht, while not evil, commits an act of evil, and it is this for which he must seek redemption in act two. Giselle’s fate is sealed from the moment she steps out of her cottage. However, if it had not been Albrecht, it would have been another. Remember Giselle’s mother has seen this all before. It is the knowledge of how vulnerable her daughter is that leads Berthe to mistrust Albrecht, posing as Loys, on first sight. Much is made that a great Giselle must distinguish between the physical and spiritual of the two acts. I would argue that this is not totally correct. The irony is that the dead Giselle of act two actually has a greater awareness of what it truly means to love someone totally as a grown woman, than did the first act girl. In act two she is a woman, with a woman’s yearning awareness of the deep sorrow that love can carry. In her end is her beginning.

Now, Guillem’s Giselle was a very sexual creature. At one point she initiates a passionate kiss with Albrecht. Fair enough. However, the sexuality shown undercuts the mad scene and the possibility of suicide as a viable dramatic concept, or totally believable one. The character of Bathilde is essential in Giselle’s downfall, her sophistication, her poise, her breeding and the notion that here is a woman completely aware of her sexuality. In Guillem’s production the meeting was almost a meeting of equals. As such, the unbearable, excruciating pathos of Giselle’s touching of Bathilde’s dress was lost. Moreover, Bathilde’s disgust at Albrecht was lessened. Giselle realizes that in terms of natural gifts she is hopelessly outclassed by Bathilde. The only force she has on her side is love and that has been proven to be worthless. In Guillem’s, the scene was almost as generic as any “other woman” drama when it reaches the moment of revelation.

In pursuit of dramatic realism, Guillem has relegated Berthe to the sidelines along with the mime scene, possibly the greatest and most famous passage of balletic mime in any ballet. In a lesser artist’s hands the mime can be hackneyed, yet in the hands of a great mime artist (Marion Tait springs to recent memory) it is chilling and indeed necessary. Don’t forget even in this 19th century hamlet the belief in the supernatural is waning. Berthe is tolerated, as a venerable member of her community, to tell, once again, the story of the Wilis. However, Giselle is embarrassed. It’s a folk tale; it’s not real. What does she need with the old stories, she’s a “modern girl” in love. It is a powerful dramatic concept leading the way for act two. Guillem has the legend of the Wilis portrayed as an almost drunken, playful comic reenaction by several villagers. While this does update the ballet as a whole it none the less, does serious harm to the dramaturgy and makes Berthe obsolete. There are three archetypes of woman in act one, three powerful dramatic archetypes. The virgin, the mother and the whore. The virgin being Giselle, the mother Berthe and the whore Bathilde. I do not mean that Bathilde is a whore in the vernacular sense, but rather woman as agent provocateur, as catalyst; she is the opposite pole to Giselle. Her arrival is the beginning of Giselle’s end. Giselle the virgin, the saintly is closely identified with her mother and with the huge overwhelming love she has for her. Guillem’s Giselle was neither fish nor flesh, she was autonomous of her mother, and in her own way as confident as Bathilde, and this muddies the water of where her character lies, of what her character represents. Because Giselle is special, she is not like the other girls, ultimately she is the ideal that Albrecht must prove himself worthy of being the living memorial to—it is after all her ballet and we must from the outset sense this by devices other than the fact that she is being played by Sylvie Guillem.

If I felt act one was valid if not entirely successful, it was act two that I take real issue with. It was remarkable for me, for being the first time I have ever enjoyed the first half more than the second.

First, there is the matter of the Giselle’s grave, which is an essential dramatic device in act two. Guillem stated that she removed the cross, as Giselle would not have been allowed to be buried on hallowed ground. But she misses the point that she is not, she is buried in a wood. The cross could have been placed by those who love her, in an attempt to save her from the hell of the Wilis. Removing the cross also confuses an audience as to what is actually happening, why Albrecht and Hilarion are there in the first place. Secondly, Guillem had Albrecht, not Hilarion, at the grave as the curtain opened. One can see why. It is after all Albrecht’s struggle that act two is primarily concerned with from a male perspective. However, it makes more sense that the grieving Hilarion is drawn out of his reverie to realize with terror that night is falling. He belongs to the peasant class who still believes in the folk tales, he knows that death is in the woods. Albrecht, a nobleman ventures into the woods willingly at night. He is aristocratic, educated. He does not believe in ghosts and ghouls. Indeed, as an answer to the cross issue, one could even assume it was the grieving Hilarion who could not bear that his beloved Giselle be buried without a cross and so ventured into the woods to plant it above her unmarked grave.

Thirdly, the cross unequivocally allies Giselle with God, with goodness, in her fight against the wilis, it is the device by which she buys Albrecht time. It is also the symbol from which she draws strength, before which she stands as she disobeys Myrtha, who recoils in pain and shock at the one force she is vulnerable to, love. The position of the cross downstage destroyed much of the dynamics of the dance. Upstage it gives us the whole stage as the arena in which the battle for Albrecht’s life and Giselle’s soul can be danced and enacted on. It also puts space between the two opposing forces ruling the second act: Giselle—goodness, unconditional love and Myrtha—evil, love turned to hate.

By eradicating the bourées of Myrtha from one side of the stage to the other at the beginning of act two, Guillem, I believe destroyed the second act. As Lynn Garafola said of the bourée: “In its weightless driftings the body seems both shorn of its volition and afloat in timelessness”. The bourée, the most basic of steps, is used to personify the weightlessness of Myrtha, the mystical nature of the Wilis. By having Myrtha and her two attendants bourée behind a scrim, around rocks, the impact of what the Wilis are is destroyed. We know that something terrible is to happen in act two. We know horrors exist in the woods, and then we get Myrtha’s transcendentally beautiful music as this exquisite creature bourées, majestically, mystically across the stage. We, the audience were wrong. There is no horror only beauty. And then we learn that the beauty is the horror, evil personified. It is a stunning coup de theatre, and gives the battle of Giselle all the more poignancy. That Guillem missed the potential for this passage is sad, it was a real error of judgment.

Curiously, in seeking to proscribe a character to each Wili, an individual threat of evil, they became less threatening and their intent unclear. It was if a psychopathic enclave of Brides and Bridesmaids models circa 1950 had come to life. The corps dancing was very bad; however, La Scala is not a company in the league of the Kirov, Royal or Paris Opera, so making the corps ununiform in appearance only served to highlight the deficiencies in their dancing. But all this would have been fine if it had worked as a dramatic device. Guillem states that she wanted to highlight the battle between Giselle and Myrtha, yet the battle was diluted, as from the outset the Wilis and Giselle all seemed to have autonomy.

The biggest choreographic crime came in the first pas de deux between Giselle and Albrecht, when she appears before him and he dances with her, fully aware she is there. This pas de deux works when, lost in grief, Albrecht is not sure she is there or not. He feels her, but is it his love, his grief which he is dancing with or is her ghost truly present? And then come the blossoms raining down on him in benediction, forgiveness. It is a moment that chills the soul. When Albrecht, broken free of his reverie, finds the blossoms which were not there before, he has hope, hope that he is worthy of forgiveness. It is a moment of transcendental beauty, to claim it unmodern, outmoded and needing of revision is wrong. It makes his fight to stay alive all the more poignant. His life has been pardoned by Giselle; it is not Myrtha’s place to steal it. However, it is the first of his two battles, it is a spiritual cleansing, coming immediately before the physical torture Myrtha subjects him to. By the end of the ballet he will be spiritually and physically pardoned. He will have earned both these blessings from Giselle.

It is here I would like to quickly mention Mats Ek’s Giselle. Of all his reworkings, his Giselle is the best, as he has tampered almost not at all with the essential story. However, in the second act his cleansing goes no further than his learning to forgive himself and see the error of his ways, as Giselle is alive, but lobotomized, and he must earn all forgiveness without her benediction. It for me is an example of how the contemporary actually says far less, goes far less deeply into the psychological than the original it was seeking to update.

Again Guillem’s choreographic minimalism diminishes, rather than adding to, the narrative. Gone are the sweeping developpé symbolizing Giselle’s yearning upward desire for love. Slowed down are her hops in attitude, as she appears for the first time as a Wili, no longer a woman, but a whirling dervish, a demon. Those fast turns symbolize the evil she has been delivered to and must fight to be free of.

And finally, surprisingly Guillem has Giselle return to the Wilis after having saved Albrecht. In Giselle, one must have the feeling that through Giselle’s act of selfless, adult unconditional love and forgiveness, she in fact has freed herself from the Wilis spell. She will return to her grave and rest. This reading also gives far more weight to Guillem’s stated intention to have wanted to highlight the battle between Giselle and Myrtha. By freeing Giselle from the Wilis at the end, the drama unequivocally shows the difference between love and hate, the battle between the two opposing spiritual forces. I was surprised that Guillem chose to ignore this. What matters Giselle’s saving of her love, if the next night her spirit will prowl the woods in search of men to kill?

Giselle, like all fairytales, exists and continues to do so due to the fact that a fairytale is an allegory containing within its drama powerful archetypes, letting the readers decide the symbols for themselves. We know that folk and fairytales carry eternal, psychological truths and messages within their fantastical structure. It is the relevance of allegory to each subsequent generation that ensures their continuance. They exist through implication, allegory and the emotional and psychological resonance that is implicit and individual for each person who comes across them. By baldly stating the truths, the sub texts, and in seeking to make the timeless “modern” one tears the passion to tatters and renders the moral crass and simplistic. Giselle, that most resonant, relevant and paradoxically ethereal of fairytale ballets, is no exception. By giving a definite, psychologically exact reading Guillem renders much of the beauty and modern relevance mundane and in places not just a little crass.

This piece first appeared, in a different form, in the British online dance magazine, www.ballet.co.uk.