THE TOKYO BALLET’S GISELLE

DANCE

20 Jul

Recently landed: The Tokyo Ballet's Giselle

Gracia’s written response to Tokyo Ballet’s Giselle, especially for Fjord Review.

When Théophile Gautier abandoned himself to “that misty, nocturnal poetry, that fantasmagoria” he found within the lines of Heinrich Heine, the familiar legend of Giselle, the ballet, began to take shape.

Inspired by Heine’s 1835 description of “affianced maidens who have died before their wedding day”, whose “hearts which have ceased to throb”[i], but whose feet will find no rest in the afterlife, Gautier was indeed right when he mused: “wouldn’t this make a pretty ballet?”[ii] Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges co-wrote the libretto; Adolphe Adam, the composition; love upon the page and stage proved more formidable than death; and as Gautier later described: “three days later, the ballet Giselle was done and received”, in 1841 at the Paris Opéra. If all of this sounds fast and fantastical, you, too, would be right. As fast and fantastical as the performance time which felt[iii] to pass in a flutter of heart beats. As fast and fantastical as the poem that transpired upon stage on the opening night of The Tokyo Ballet’s Giselle, presented by The Australian Ballet at the State Theatre.

I entered the theatre knowing a little of the history of Giselle, but this perhaps does not convey how it felt to behold the apparition of the Wilis, with First Soloist Akimi Denda every fibre the supernatural, implacable Myrtha, for The Tokyo Ballet’s Australian debut. For an awareness of what Giselle is and what Giselle feels like when you are sat in the audience do not always equal the same thing. Nor does it convey the autumnal daytime village charm of Act One and the necessary contrasting otherworldly brilliance of finding yourself graveside in a forest at night, with the beauty of Act Two’s anticipated ballet blanc that takes your breath away from its veiled get-go. Like Gautier, I abandoned myself to the nocturnal poetry and willingly let the dance make me weightless. For just as Giselle can give a spirit a form, it can, I feel, make a body (in the audience, in this case, mine) a spirit, and in doing so, enable it to soar.

[i] Heinrich Heine wrote De l’Allemagne in Paris, 1835, and his summary of the Slavic legend of the Wilis, with maidens by moonlight “in their bridal dresses, with garlands of flowers on their heads, and shining rings on their fingers” who cannot rest in peace for “in their dead feet, there still remains that passion for dancing which they could not satisfy during life.”

[ii] Cecile Noble, citing Ivor Guest from ‘The Two Giselles of the Romantic Ballet’, within ‘Théophile Gautier and the Wilis’, Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 39/40 (Summer/Fall 1997), p.90, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40837168, accessed 15th July, 2023.

[iii] Actual performance time: 2-hours and 10 minutes, with one interval.