Dispatches - Akram Khan's Giselle
2500 words that began as a 'brief review', sorry!
It probably says a lot about me — too much, perhaps — that when I was twelve years old, I dressed as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis for Halloween. Ballet was truly my first love. I don’t remember a point in my life before it; some of my earliest memories are of watching recorded VHS tapes of Christmas ballets we’d recorded from BBC 2, of my books of ballet stories, of walking along the landing of my childhood home en pointe (or what I believed to be at the time), using the bannister as a ballet barre. (I’ve long wondered if that was what fucked up my toes).
The Halloween costume was great, but woefully underappreciated. I suppose I just seemed a sort of haunting fairy. Explaining that I was dressed as one of the ghosts of young peasant women who loved to dance and were betrayed by their lovers is a bit of a clumsy elevator pitch, I suppose, and it seemed to confuse more than it cleared things up.
Giselle premiered in 1841 at Salle Le Peletier in Paris.1 It had all the ingredients for a smash hit — many of the names that feature in the history of its opening have gone down as legends of 19th-century ballet. The titular role was created for Carlotta Grisi, and choreographed by Jean Corralli and Jules Perrot.2 Opposite Grisi in the role of Albrecht, Giselle’s lover, was Lucien Petipa, whose brother Marius went on to serve as the master of the Imperial Russian Ballet for over thirty years.3
Like many Romantic Ballets, Giselle has one foot in an imagined world of idealised peasant life, and the other in the world of the supernatural and folkloric. Giselle is a young girl who loves to dance, despite her mother’s repeated warnings about her weak heart. A young nobleman, Albrecht, disguises himself as a peasant to win her love, a deception noticed by Hilarion, a gamekeeper who also loves Giselle. Eventually, Hilarion reveals this to Giselle, calling over the party of visiting nobles who recognise Albrecht as one of their own, including Bathilde, who is betrothed to him. Giselle is driven mad by this revelation, dancing a frantic, anguished number that ends in her death. In the original version, this was a suicide, though in most productions since, she is shown to dance herself to death, her weak heart giving out.
The second act leaves behind the village and moves to Giselle’s grave in the forest. Her spirit is roused by Myrtha and the Wilis, who are the spirits of spurned women. Hilarion comes to her grave, stumbling into the path of the Wilis who find him and force him to dance until he dies of exhaustion. Albrecht has also come to visit Giselle’s grave, where the Wilis try to kill him too, but Giselle saves him, helping him dance through the night without succumbing to exhaustion. As the sun rises, the Wilis return to their graves while Giselle, having rejected their rage, moves on, finally at peace.
The plot always strikes me as quite strange. The first half presents a natural endpoint, one that reminds me of 20th-century narrative ballets — Romeo & Juliet, Manon, etc — but the tale continues, morphing from a human tragedy of betrayal into a story of supernatural revenge and transcendent forgiveness. It’s not unheard of for the period — La Sylphide (1832) similarly features two acts, the first more rooted in the human world, the second in the supernatural one. But it is interesting to me that of all the Romantic Ballets, it is Giselle (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Coppélia) that has become canonical. I’m reminded a little of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela,4 an early novel which draws the plot of the courtship novel beyond the marriage, which has since become such a ‘natural’ conclusion in similar narratives since — Giselle does similar, reaching beyond the death of heroine of the tragic romance.
Akram Khan’s version, which recently returned to Sadler’s Wells, takes the basic plot but abandons feudalism for capitalism. Khan’s background is in Kathak and contemporary dance; Giselle was his first full-length ballet, premiering in 2016. The piece takes place in a factory with spare, minimalist stage design. Giselle and the peasants are migrant workers (‘outcasts’ in the language of the programme), Albrecht is a landlord disguising himself as a worker, Hilarion is a sort of intermediary boss, serving the landlords and keeping the workers in line, the Wilis are the ghosts of women who died in unsafe conditions.
I don’t remember the first time I saw Giselle — I think I must have seen a version broadcast on TV at some point, the way I was introduced to most of the classics — but I knew the story well even in childhood.5 I remember thinking of the story as simply a tragic romance, and probably one I felt more comfortable with for the opportunity of a narrative beyond death. With all my then-pre-feminist resentments, I thought the Wilis were cool, but also took the romance of the piece at face value, touched by how Giselle saved Albrecht, one last gesture of a lost love.
The first time I saw Giselle on stage was the first tour of Akram Khan’s production in 2016. I was very unwell at the time, so my recall is a little hazy, but I do remember how struck I was by the violence of the whole thing. I was bringing my own experiences to how I interpreted it, but I found his deception sickening and cowardly and cruel. I almost wanted her to let him die, wanted him to suffer.
The next production I saw was at the Royal Ballet in 2021. I went in, thinking of the rage Akram Khan’s version had provoked in me, but unexpectedly, I was moved by the mercy Giselle shows Albrecht in the second act. That I felt it was undeserved made it all the more powerful to me. This production made her death quite explicitly a suicide, which perhaps added to that sense of surprising mercy, I’m not sure. Thinking of it now, I am reminded of Christina Rossetti’s Cousin Kate, a poem with a very different narrative, but one of a similar kind of casual cruelty, the misogyny of a man too thoughtless to be actively malicious, simply acting out of entitlement. It’s a sleazy, sad kind of harm, so tragic and ordinary.
Earlier this year, I saw the English National Ballet’s production, which features additional choreography by Mary Skeaping, who in 1971 worked to reconstruct and reimagine a number of scenes that had been cut from choreography in the century and a half since the ballet’s debut. I thought it was a beautiful production, though I had mixed feelings about the additions — some are lovely and made me think a lot about the piece’s place in ballet history, but some of the mime scenes dragged. I think subtlety is always a difficult balance, but I felt some of the pathos was undercut by the attempt to bring a kind of language into such an extralingual art form. Still, I went away thinking a lot about the capital R-Romance of the ballet and where it fits within the canon of Romanticism as a broader artistic movement.
Last week, I went to see Akram Khan’s version again. There were parts I remembered, but in many ways, it was like seeing the production for the first time — partly because I was well enough to really take it in, partly because I’m a better and more attentive audience member these days, given all the practice I get spending too much money on ballet tickets.
I found myself thinking a lot about class treachery, resistance and redemption. Albrecht’s deception was still sinister, but I got more from it this time. The set of the first act features a large concrete wall scattered with handprints, which the workers reach and touch. Later, Giselle and Albrecht dance alone together, during which she takes his hand to each handprint, showing him. As with any good tragedy, I was hoping against the plot I knew would come, hoping Albrecht could learn from her and turn against the landlords. I was reminded of something my nan has always said on visits to old historical sites — that people had walked the same steps for thousands of years, touched the same walls. Perhaps it was that I was bringing to it, but I found this scene very moving, kept thinking: every handprint, a human life. It made me think too of my favourite part of the wonderfully charming Lisa Frankenstein, where Lisa watches the undead creature in her living room play one of his old compositions on the piano and realises: “you had a whole life”. Khan’s Giselle is such a vibrant, willful heroine, one who seems to insist on the value of the lives of her fellow workers and refuses to yield to authority.
When the landlords visit, Giselle refuses to bow to them, and, as she recognises her own handiwork, audaciously touches the dress of Bathilde, who unbeknownst to her, is Albrecht’s betrothed. Despite his supposed love for her, Hilarion pulls her away, restrains her from her insolent behaviour, forces her to bow. He exists in the piece as a different kind of class traitor, one proud of the proximity to power and status that comes with his role as an intermediary, more than willing to exert what little power he has on the landlords’ orders.
Albrecht’s deception itself was less tragic to me this time, it was his obedience that stung. He has an opportunity to turn against the power of his class and align himself with Giselle’s values, but he is a coward. This is the betrayal that drives Giselle mad, so vulnerable that she cannot resist when her fellow ‘outcasts’ encircle her on the order of a landlord, leaving her dead. Only then is Albrecht so shaken that he can choose otherwise — he is perhaps not redeemed, but certainly transformed. By the end of the second act, he is left alone, returning to the human realm as an ‘outcast’ himself. The tragedy of it is inescapable — if he had refused loyalty to fellow landlords, she might have survived, but it takes her death to push him towards any true class treachery. If Giselle is liberated at the end of the traditional versions, finally free to move on, in Khan’s version, it is as much Albrecht who is liberated.
Still, Giselle remains the protagonist of the ballet, even in death. The Wilis are — as I felt in my adolescence — objectively very cool. Awe-inspiring in their just rage, perhaps. This time, I was reminded of the ghosts in Mati Diop’s Atlantique, workers seeking justice for their deaths, after unpaid wages forced them to take the deadly journey from Senegal to Spain by sea. Like Diop’s ghosts, I rooted for Khan’s Wilis, agreed with their rage. But it’s a terrifying, indiscriminate rage, one that even targets Giselle, once again pressured to yield to authority, this time that of Myrtha. Giselle once again resists, unwilling to surrender to their rage. If in the original ballet, any insolence or spiritedness is played as cute and naive, Khan’s version plays it as a conscientous kind of disobedience.
I think Khan’s version is an astonishing work, surely one of the greats of 21st-century Ballet so far. But as enthralled as I am by the choreography, I feel ambivalent about the rest. On a purely aesthetic level, I am quickly growing tired of the tones of grey that dominate the costume and set design of many contemporary ballets I’ve seen lately. I find myself wondering if I’m being old-fashioned, even conservative, longing for the opulent maximalism of traditional costuming, even in 20th-century pieces I’ve seen, like MacMillan’s Manon. But MacMillan’s ballets weren’t exclusively traditional, and he worked with a great number of artists, including the inimitable Nicholas Georgiadis, who brought a bold, colourful vision to MacMillan’s shows. Reading about MacMillan’s work with these young, emerging designers, I’m brought back to what might be the real source of this gripe, that ballet (and perhaps art in general) was in a much more adventurous place in the post-war period. It wasn’t exactly avant-garde, perhaps, but it was not confined to the stiff, upper echelons of our culture. In my more pessimistic moments, I wonder if ballet is in a similar place to painting nowadays, both valued for their history, but neither reaching their full potential in the current moment.
Beyond London’s dance history, I keep thinking of the costume designs included in the Ukrainian Modernism show recently at the Royal Academy, by Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov, Anatol Petrytskyi, Alexandra Exter, and Vadym Meller. I’d never seen that kind of abstraction applied to something so practical as costume design sketches — so playful and thrilling. When I think of all the grayscale minimalism of the recent contemporary shows I’ve seen, I feel there is something of that millennial grey velvet schtick to it all. What has a girl got to do for a little colour?
I’m ambivalent on a narrative level too. The plot is vague, abstracting real structures of domination and exploitation into something archetypal and fairytale. Perhaps this a 21st-century answer to the abstractions of peasant life you find in 19th-century ballet. Maybe it’s just a work of the 2010s, a decade of bleak, fictional dystopias, of mealy-mouthed overtures about ‘late capitalism’ and the impossibility of ‘ethical consumption’.
Maybe I’m asking too much. Can Ballet ever be radical or even progressive as an art form? With half an audience paying hundreds, its origins as a courtly dance, all the ties it has to elite & royal institutions, I’m a little sceptical. But I do think it will always be worth defending, attending to, caring about. I’ve been reading a lot lately about fascism & aesthetics. I don’t know that I have solid arguments to make yet, but I’m struck by the fascist investment in neoclassicism and revulsion of bourgeois decadence (like ballet!) as much as of the avant-garde. Goebbels even banned narrative ballet. I suppose the form will suffer under any anti-art agenda. As such, I suppose I’m grateful for a work like Giselle, to love and question and mull over.
Then home to the Paris Opera and Paris Opera Ballet. I have restrained myself from giving you War & Peace on the history of Paris’ opera houses, but I could write an essay on this alone. Feel free to congratulate me on my self-control.
Perrot was highly lauded as a choreographer in the 1840s, his other works include Pas de Quatre, La Esmeralda and Ondine.
Personally, he is legendary to me as a master, mentor and teacher of Anna Pavlova; he features heavily in Gladys Malvern’s novel of Pavlova’s life, Dancing Star. Also worthy of note: Lucien & Marius were the sons of Jean-Antoine Petipa, who was himself a successful ballet master across Europe.
Forgive me, I’m reading Pamela Regis’ A Natural History of the Romance Novel at the minute.
Like many mid-90s ballet babies, I read the Darcey Bussell-approved Illustrated Book of Ballet Stories like it was my bible.