At 185, "Giselle" Still Rings with Breathless Magic
- 4 days ago
- 11 min read
“She was all dance, and laughter, and delight.”
-Victor Hugo, Fantômes, 1829
Pacific Northwest Ballet has, for well over a decade, been at the forefront of historically-informed stagings of classic works. In 2011, Peter Boal’s restaging of the Romantic-era masterpiece, Giselle, presented a wealth of knowledge that traces the influential work’s history to its roots. This June, Giselle will reach its 185th anniversary, days after the 15th anniversary of Peter Boal’s restaging, which originally strove to restore lost elements and to deepen the story. While varying adaptations of Giselle abound around the World, it can easily be claimed that we have one of the most thoughtful, academically-informed, and poetic productions right here in Seattle.
In just two acts, Giselle brims with symbolism, passion, forgiveness, comedy, and drama; it criticizes aristocracy and class, it weaves a web of leitmotifs, and builds an ethereal realm where mist and shadows blur reality. Its impact on ballet cannot be overstated, nor can the influence of its revitalized original intentions be undermined.
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Giselle is acclaimed for being the first 21st-century look at the 19th-century production, and the first use in modern times of French sources. With additional choreography by Peter Boal and a blending of French and Russian documents, it never claims to be a replica of the original, but retrieves cast-away bits of scene, character hue, and pantomime to create a Giselle that is an astonishing and undeniably valuable work of historical preservation.
We’re reminded of this history by the lithograph-adorned scrim that opens the top of each act, capturing the scenic design of the original production that fades into the reality behind, and later, the drawing of Giselle’s death scene that evokes a sense of the thousands of times that this tale has been told. Jérôme Kaplan’s costume and scenic design create a visually opulent world of autumnal tones and ghostly forest shades appropriately set in the era of Giselle’s creation, the mid-1800s. Rich in hue and detail, with skirts that float like mist and curl in their fullness, Kaplan’s designs are a captivation in themselves, with nods towards the original 1841 costumes for Giselle and Myrtha being a particular gift of his archival consideration. Whenever an artist designs both costumes and set, the world gains a priceless continuity that, particularly in the tableau at the end of Act 1, creates a visually striking scene straight out of a German Romantic painting. Théophile Gautier, struck by inspiration for the ballet, wrote in 1841 that he at first “thought it was quite impossible to transpose onto the stage that misty, nocturnal poetry”. And yet, enchanted by Randall G. Chiarelli’s moonlight in Act Two, one entirely forgets time and place.
There is a tendency for both audiences and critics alike to assume that just because not every audience member will understand pantomime, it should not be presented as it once was. Peter Boal’s Giselle is richly supported by the pantomime brought back into the ballet’s fold. Most productions, or dare I say nearly all productions of Giselle, have lost the majority of their pantomime in the process of almost 200 years' worth of restagings and reenvisions. One must only find a recording of any other Giselle to realize what a gem we have in Seattle. In these versions where pantomime has been chiseled to its bare minimum, Adolphe Adam’s score speaks on, yet there are no words to follow his structure, as though the characters have forgotten their lines and made do with vague gestures or restrained stillness. Just as Peter Boal’s extravagant Sleeping Beauty declared at its premiere in early 2025, pantomime has a value that far exceeds historical religiousness. It is tethered to ballet’s voice, and choosing to omit it now would mean that someday, it may no longer exist at all. What we gain from returning to Giselle’s roots is immeasurably significant to the preservation of ballet as a whole.
Peter Boal’s Giselle revives not only choreography, scene, and mime, but restorations of character that shift the entire nature of the ballet. Over the course of the 20th century, Giselle’s nature had been diminished to a weakened spirit whose madness comes as no surprise. In most productions, the expectation is for Giselle to be “vulnerable and fragile”, as critic Jerry Hochman wrote just last summer. Doug Fullington and Marian Smith remark in Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg that, “to see a strong and lively young woman go mad is a far more potent theatrical experience than seeing a simpering, weak one do so, for she is traveling a much greater psychological distance.” In PNB’s production, as in 1841, Giselle is lively, imperfect, rebellious, and real in a way that few other ballet heroines are. I cannot overemphasize enough what a difference it makes to portray her as having agency, and how such a temperament translates to the courageous strength she portrays in Act Two.
In Act One, we see her playing hard to get with Loys, standing her ground with Hilarion, refusing to work (symbolically refusing to harvest grapes: a symbol of life and immortality!), and ruffling feathers with her mother out of defiance. She seems like she should stem from a contemporary creation attempting to make the past more relevant, but Giselle was this way from the start. Her outspoken, deeply passionate persona serves not as a warning, as one imagines it easily could have in 1841, but only makes her two deaths a startling devastation time and time again.
When we meet her, she’s a spritely young thing, bounding from her cottage door and soon finding a sweet playfulness beside Albert. But moments later, as Hilarion confronts the lovebirds, her fortitude that will define the meaning of the rest of the ballet is solidified in her response to his assertion. In other productions, this moment is where we see her at her most vulnerable. She’s shoved and grabbed, and yet responds with only the softest wilting pantomime that politely declines Hilarion’s profession or lets Albert deal with the confrontation entirely. Under Peter Boal’s direction, and guided by the historical advisement of Doug Fullington and Marian Smith, this scene is only one of many where we see Giselle’s bold, unflinching spirit. She is unafraid to speak her mind and declares her feelings valiantly.
A depiction of fragility leads audiences to believe that Giselle, even with its wilis (who, though entirely invented by 19th-century men, seem to speak as a whole on the power of sisterhood and unity of women throughout history), is far from the kind of strong female heroine story we’d hope to give our daughters today. But for those of us lucky enough to have been raised with PNB’s Giselle, there is no question that Giselle is determined, assertive, and defined by a fundamental strength that never withers, but is only clarified after death.
It is one thing to take on a role that seemingly every great ballerina from Grisi and Pavlova to PNB’s own Körbes and Nakamura has taken on, it is another thing entirely to possess the role so firmly that any thought of such history slips from the mind. PNB returns Giselle to her original intention of character, and Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan’s Giselle is exemplary in this regard. She is endearing from the first glimpse: bright-eyed and eager, strong-willed in all she does, full of zest and sweetness, and above all, a genuineness that fills each millisecond of her presence.
The past two reps (Kent Stowell’s Firebird and Cinderella) were filled with astonishing debuts for Ryan, but in her first opening night full-length, a quality that has been blossoming for years seemed to strike a new light. Toni Bentley has a lovely quote about how rare it is to find a dancer who “dances so deeply, not only spatially, but morally, that she does not show soul, but becomes it.” And indeed, Ryan’s got the kind of verve and wholehearted expression that swells each step with character.
Her ebulliance and contagious joy find a beautiful partner in Kyle Davis, whose Albert is so down to earth, so cheerful and carefree that it's hard to believe he could ever lie. In their hands, the story of Giselle is as alive and pertinent as ever, and breathes with a vitality that is theirs and theirs alone.
Without ever once grazing the edge of melodramatic, Ryan manages to craft a mad scene that is a portrayal for the ages. In an instant, the Giselle we already adore so dearly is unrecognizable, with chilling, far-off eyes, a haze in her gesture, and unsteady feet drifting through familiar phrases with agonizing remembrance. The best mad scenes are painful to watch, and Ryan’s potent heartache is a visceral devastation. Davis’ Albert also gains a new hue in this scene, wild with agony, and sending poor Hilarion flying across the stage in his rage.
There are nuances in Act Two that I would be remiss not to mention. The unwavering sorrow and fear in Ryan’s eyes that embalms all she does, the clarity of her mimed tears, and, as she calls for him to join her in her endless dance, the brilliant differentiation that she is doing so against her own will. From the moment she arises from her grave, unfurling the softest willowing limbs in time-suspended motion, her control, steadiness, and ethereal fluidity are arresting. At her side, Davis’ nimble vigor and soul-stirring desperation are propelled to tremendous heights. Their sincerity spins a story that is devastatingly real. Real enough to forget that it is, after all, just a tale upon the stage, and real enough to carry home some haunting, lingering weight.
During Saturday’s matinee, a torch was passed. As Elizabeth Murphy stepped into the last full-length of her remarkable career, Christopher D’Ariano’s debut as Albert found him in a destined role. They are a pristine pairing, spun of light and air, who are possessed of morality in their movement. Murphy is classically exquisite in each small inflection, sweetly innocent in her humor, and acutely attuned to D’Ariano’s Albert. Her wispy hold of reality in the mad scene, flushed and feverish with a quiver to her hysteria, is marked by unseeing eyes that drift and wander until she’s far removed from the scene around her. And of course, the grace seen in her life-filled youth is only multiplied by her winged state in Act Two. Murphy is a swift breeze of elongated, crystalline poise whose weightless presence meets D’Ariano at an almost translucent place of being.
If there was ever an Albert to descend directly from Théophile Gautier, it is D’Ariano, who is a Romantic poet himself in the sincerity he weaves. His hearty mime, carriage of charisma, not to mention the lyricism that envelops each step and gesture, is the work of virtuosic artistic freedom. He is unbound from this earth in all regards to lofty, soaring height and soundless landings, only growing more buoyant in his incredible chain of endless entrechat six. The pure remorse that drenched his being in the final act was enough to see Albert in a new light, unforgettably vivid and distinct in his veracity.
Angelica Generosa’s Giselle is bright and young at heart, a cheerful soul whose character glistens with exactitude and delicacy. She’s exuberant, wonderfully stubborn, and yet, in the sustain of her sweeping extensions and precise solidity, we gain a fuller picture of her character's virtue. In Act Two, there’s a flicker of Odette in her quickest footwork, a strength that enunciates Giselle’s drive and her glimmers of hope until dawn has broken.
Jonathan Batista always finds a way to push further, and three years after premiering Albert, he is filled with newfound determination to find the highest expression of despair and flight. Batista and Generosa’s lifts are weightless breaths, their control suspends reality, and at their most vulnerable, they dance as though they share one body, so deeply attuned and invested in the present are they. To watch Genersosa gently beg her heartbroken Albert to go, to watch her final act be one of such pure generosity, left the full house breathless as she slipped away from the light.
I’ve mentioned the significance of pantomime restoration, and nowhere is that restoration more crucial than in Berthe’s mimed monologue in which she warns Giselle that she will become a wili if she keeps overexerting herself in her dancing. Adam interrupts the tonally bright first act to let a mother’s wise words foreshadow the second act, where he’ll later quote Berthe’s leitmotif note for note when the men first encounter the will-o'-the-wisps so that we recognize that her warning is coming true.
But, most productions cut her mime to its skeleton, or obliterate it altogether, so that Berthe only shows vague worry before allowing her daughter to frolic once more. What we lose then is context for the severity of Berthe’s fears, the confrontation of motherly wisdom that Giselle must push back against, and perhaps most importantly, the understanding of how deeply wilis are interwoven into the legends of this story’s region.
All historical significance aside, Berthe’s monologue is revered as one of the greatest in the canon. Marian Smith calls it a “virtuosic mime scene”, and when executed with a deep understanding, it is exemplary of how beautiful and stirring pantomime can be. Elle Macy’s mime is, as we’ve seen many times before, filled with a gestural strength that few possess. To believe so fully the conjured tales one's hands are spinning, to unearth every sliver of truth with fingers full of lore and eyes that see it all... the intentionality with which Macy fills this riveting monologue is chilling.
With moonlight falling through the trees and velvet mist underfoot, “the second act is nearly an exact translation of the page I have taken the liberty of tearing from your book,” Théophile Gautier declared in a letter to Heinrich Heine after the successful premiere of Giselle. There we find Myrtha floating across the stage, our first vision of a wili whose pristine beauty contrasts with the men's fear in the scene before (a scene gone since the mid 1860s, now restored at PNB). Though many portrayals of Myrtha tend to make her cruel spirit clear from the start, her music tells us otherwise, for she enters to the most ethereal sound of the entire ballet: harp and violins blending to spin an otherworldly presence. Amanda Morgan has found the softness required for us to see that Myrtha is not all vengeance and fills her queenly reign with an underlying melancholy.
The wilis, too, with their wind-stirred wings, begin with only innocent gentleness in the moonlight. Arms crossed, corpse-like, bathing in cool water with arms en couronne, their harmless beauty is distilled in their lightness of foot and luring steps that skim the forest floor. In 1841, one critic wrote, “It is the first time that we have seen the fantastic treated with a due regard for grace and charm, and perhaps this will never be more happily achieved.” But when the score takes a turbulent turn, and they’ve encircled a group of men, the charge of white power that alights makes one marvel at the female role in this nearly 200-year-old ballet. It was these early Romantic ballets like La Sylphide and Giselle that placed women as sovereigns of the art and introduced an ethical element that turned to matters of the soul for plot, and yet, even knowing this, it’s still a startling historical image.
Tchaikovsky described Adam’s Giselle as “poetic, musical, and a choreographic jewel,” a work that deeply influenced the tone he found in Swan Lake, and later in the vision scene of The Sleeping Beauty. Adam’s score was revolutionary for its time, far exceeding expectations for ballet music, and was created in collaboration with the ballet's choreographers so that score and step are not only tightly interwoven, but filled with entangled meaning.
At the dress rehearsal in 1841, Adolphe Adam made a last-minute change to the ending of the ballet. Instead of simply returning to her grave, Giselle was to be placed in a bed of flowers and made to, as Adam put it, “disappear little by little,” to better end “this legend full of poetry.” While at PNB, she does return to her old grave, a bit of stage magic allows her to appear within her grave stone before drifting from view; a torturous disappearance of the character we’ve grown to love so dearly in the span of two hours.
Giselle is a tale of wronged women, of forgiveness, and love’s boundless nature. It is a ballet of duality, a visual poem born from two literary works, conceived by a poet and born into poetic form. To be in communion with such history, to witness the active preservation of one of ballet’s most influential works, is to sit under a spell for two hours, and to leave with some bittersweet shadow still grazing your heart.
Sources
“Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle” by Marian Smith
Conversations on Dance, Ep. 374: “The History of ‘Giselle’ with Alastair Macauley
“Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg” by Doug Fullington and Marian Smith
“Reading Dance” edited by Robert Gottlieb
“Serenade” by Toni Bentley
“Symbolism in 19th Century Ballet” by Margaret Fleming-Markarian
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