Where narrative ballet is concerned, a dancer must be able to personify a highly diverse assortment of personality types. Indeed, in a single narrative ballet, particularly one that fills a full evening’s performance, the demands of the plot require the dancer to shift from one set of dispositions to another. Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, Diane B. Wilsey Principal Dancer in the San Francisco Ballet Sasha De Sola made it clear that she could negotiate a multitude of narrative settings.
Readers may recall my having included a photograph of her at work in preparing for a performance of the role of Salome in Bridget Breiner’s “The Queen’s Daughter.” While I was not particularly impressed by the ballet itself, it was hard to avoid appreciating how De Sola inhabited her role. Last night she returned to the Opera House to take the lead as title character in the first of ten performances of the two-act ballet Giselle.
First performed on June 28, 1841, this is one of the oldest ballets to remain in repertoire. (The general consensus is that the oldest is La fille mal gardée (the wayward daughter), which was first performed on July 1, 1789. I cannot recall how many times I have listened to someone discuss this ballet by first saying, “It’s older than Giselle!) Helgi Tomasson prepared his own choreography, drawing upon the original source by Jules Perrot and Jean Coralli, as well as subsequent revisions by Marius Petipa.
The narrative begins with Count Albrecht (Aaron Robison) disguising himself as the peasant “Loys” to woo Giselle. Her dancing is all fresh enthusiasm. However, she has a weak heart; and her mother Berthe (Anita Paciotti) does her best at curbing her daughter’s enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the game keeper Hilarion (Nathaniel Remez) is on to Albrecht’s deception; and the first-act narrative comes to a climax when Albrecht is revealed for who he is in the presence of not only Giselle but also his true fiancée Bathilde (Sasha Mukhamedov).
This is where De Sola’s dramatic potential first comes into play. In an instant her youthful exuberance is overcome by the shock of a harsh reality. She does not quite go through the full stages of the grief model of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross; but, in last night’s choreography, one could observe denial, frustration (rather than anger), and a depression that ultimately resolves as death.
The curtain rises in the second act on a corner in the forest where we see the tombstone for Giselle’s grave. The forest is haunted by the Wilis, all ghosts of betrayed maidens that died of a broken heart. This provides an opportunity for extensive corps de ballet choreography; and last night’s performance was engaging enough that the observer cared little that the narrative had come to a screaming halt.
Sasha De Sola and Aaron Robison in the second act of Giselle (photograph by Lindsay Thomas, courtesy of San Francisco Ballet)
Indeed, the most important part of the narrative involves Giselle joining the band of Wilis. We also see them drive Hilarion to death when all he wanted to do was leave flowers on Giselle’s grave. The Wilis then go after Albrecht; but, even in death, Giselle has enough love for him to plead for his life. As the sun rises, the Wilis must disband, leaving Albrecht alone in the woods. Deciding whether he has learned anything from his experiences is left as an exercise for the observer.
This is clearly a narrative that requires more than a little suspension of disbelief on the part of the observer. Nevertheless, the choreography for both corps and individual characters was consistently engaging. Tomasson clearly knew how to tell a very old (if not dated) story in a manner that would be convincing to a present-day audience. Back in the Seventies I went through a period when I felt I was seeing Giselle too many times. Half a century later, Tomasson’s staging allowed me to revisit the ballet with unexpected freshness.
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