The Challenge of Giselle
Giselle is one of the oldest continuously performed ballets in the repertoire, and with age comes the weight of expectation. Every new production enters into dialogue not just with Adam's score but with more than a century and a half of interpretive history. The danger is twofold: reverence so total that the work becomes museum piece, or innovation so aggressive that the ballet's fragile emotional logic is shattered. This new staging navigates that tension with impressive sureness of foot.
Act One: The Village
The first act is where many productions of Giselle sag — the mime-heavy narrative exposition can feel slow and opaque to contemporary audiences. Not here. The director has trimmed the more archaic mime passages without losing the story's momentum, and the village choreography has been freshened with small, intelligent additions that make the community feel genuinely inhabited rather than merely picturesque.
The lead ballerina's Giselle is immediately compelling. She plays the role's famous innocence not as naivety but as a kind of fierce, concentrated joy — this Giselle is alive in every cell of her body, which makes the first act betrayal and its aftermath all the more devastating. The mad scene, which can easily tip into melodrama, is handled with unusual restraint. The breakdown is internal before it is external; you watch the light go out before the collapse.
Act Two: Among the Wilis
The second act is where Giselle lives or dies, and this production delivers something genuinely memorable. The corps de ballet work here is extraordinary — the Wilis move with an eerie, mechanical precision that is deeply unsettling without ever becoming robotic. The choreographic phrasing creates a sense of something inhuman operating through human bodies.
The partnership between Giselle and Albrecht in the second act is crucial, and here the chemistry between the two leads is palpable. His Albrecht is neither heroic nor simply villainous — he is a man who made a selfish choice and now must live in its consequences, and his anguish feels earned rather than performed. The pas de deux that forms the act's emotional climax is danced with exceptional musicality and physical intelligence.
Musical Values
Adam's score is conducted with considerable sensitivity to the dancing. The tempos in the second act — always contentious in Giselle — feel chosen for the performers and the dramatic moment rather than imposed. The orchestra plays with warmth and transparency, particularly in the quieter passages that frame the Wili sequences.
Design
The set design serves the ballet well without overwhelming it. Act One uses warm, earthy tones and natural textures; Act Two shifts to cool blues and silvers with a floating gauze cyclorama that creates a convincing otherworldliness. The lighting design is particularly effective in the second act — moonlight, mist, and shadow used with discipline and imagination.
Conclusion
This Giselle does not reinvent the wheel, nor does it need to. What it does is dance this extraordinary ballet with skill, care, and genuine feeling, in a production that creates the conditions for the work's essential mystery to operate. For regular ballet audiences, it is a reference production worth seeing multiple times. For those coming to Giselle for the first time, there is no better place to start.
Running time: Approximately 2 hours with one interval.