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The Guardian
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We fell in love with the ballet and with her': why 184-year-old Giselle keeps us swooning
'I thought I looked too healthy to play her,' says Miyako Yoshida of her debut in Giselle, back in the 90s, when she was a vibrant, strong young dancer asked to play the part of the sweet village girl with a weak heart. 'But from the first time I came on stage, I could just live her,' she says; she simply became Giselle. Yoshida is not the only dancer, or audience member, or ballet critic, to fall in love with this 19th-century peasant girl. 'It was always my favourite,' says English National Ballet's Erina Takahashi, 'emotionally you can explore yourself in such a wide range.' 'It's a perfect ballet choreographically,' according to veteran dancer Alessandra Ferri. Giselle is almost the oldest ballet heroine to still grace the stage, created in 1841 by librettist Théophile Gautier, choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, and a young star ballerina of the day Carlotta Grisi. Through the decades the character has inspired legendary performances from some of the world's best ballerinas: Galina Ulanova, Natalia Makarova, and more recently a startling interpretation from Natalia Osipova. The story centres on open-hearted Giselle who has fallen deeply in love with Albrecht, not knowing that he is actually a nobleman (and betrothed to boot) who is on holiday from responsibility and only pretending to be a fellow peasant. When she discovers his betrayal, Giselle descends into madness, and depending on which version you watch, either dies of a broken heart, or stabs herself with Albrecht's sword. The second act shifts from sunny pastorale to ghostly woods and the vengeful wilis, the spirits of jilted women who force men to dance themselves to death. They're gunning for Albrecht, except that Giselle's love for him is so enduring that she saves him. It's a rich role for a ballerina, from girlish to deranged to otherworldly all in one night. 'You die for your soul to be free, so you learn how one should love,' Ferri told a meeting of the London Ballet Circle recently. 'When you are able to dance from that profundity, the ballet is eternal.' The ballet is as popular as ever, performed by major ballet companies around the world. One of those, National Ballet of Japan, under Yoshida's direction, is bringing their version to London this summer. It's also been repeatedly reinvented. Mats Ek's version took place in an asylum, Dance Theatre of Harlem's in a Louisiana plantation. In Akram Khan's award-winning 2016 production, a huge hit for English National Ballet (it tours to Taiwan in May), Giselle and her fellow 'villagers' are migrant factory workers, trapped in poverty behind the set's huge domineering wall. Another reimagining of Giselle is about to debut in London made by two artists who had never actually seen the ballet before they decided to make the show. Swiss theatre director François Gremaud was simply looking for a ballet with its heroine's name in the title, having made a successful piece based on Racine's Phèdre (he completed the trilogy with operatic heroine Carmen). But in the end, 'we fell in love with the ballet, and I must say, with the character,' says Gremaud. His partner in the production is Dutch dancer Samantha van Wissen, known for her work with Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker – austere, rigorous contemporary dance that's worlds away from floaty Romantic ballet. The work they have made, Giselle..., showing as part of the Dance Reflections festival, is a deconstruction of the ballet, with van Wissen explaining the story, the scenery, the historical context, and playing all the characters. For Gremaud, it's about revisiting the work and trying to give a modern take. 'Ballet has greatly constrained the female body, not least because it was a masculine projection of the feminine ideal,' he says. 'In our show, we wanted to tell the story of the original ballet very faithfully, with respect, and at the same time make a real contemporary gesture by putting on stage a performer who is absolutely free. Samantha improvises her dances every night.' In the research, Gremaud and van Wissen watched videos of multiple productions, but their favourite was American Ballet Theatre's from 1977, with Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov. 'It goes beyond technique,' says van Wissen. 'You really see, through the movement, the love between those people. It made a link to my work with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, where she always said: 'It starts from the movement.' You don't add too much theatricality, the movement speaks enough.' It was revelatory for van Wissen. 'I never thought I could be touched like this by a classical ballet.' Gremaud says great theatrical characters stand the test of time when they represent universal ideas. For Giselle, that's unconditional love. 'She places love above everything, above revenge, even her own death,' he says. It's not very feminist though, is it? Unconditional love for someone who treats you badly. 'Some have interpreted Giselle as a submissive woman,' Gremaud admits. 'But in the second act she really takes control. She's the one who acts, and it's thanks to her that Albrecht survives. So she can also, I think, be seen as a strong woman who stands up for what she believes is right.' Takahashi danced the leading role in Khan's version and saw the character recast in a more 21st-century light, but still sees the same woman at heart. 'Classical Giselle is quite vulnerable,' she says, 'and Akram's Giselle might look strong, she's the leader of the group, but I think inside she has the same sensitivity. She's also very open, she's a positive person, and when tragedy comes, that really hurts.' Giselle continues to be an inspiration, 184 years on. 'It's a piece of genius,' says choreographer Sally Marie, who is working on an idea for a 'Fuck-you feminist sci-fi punk version of Giselle', yet one she says will be 'still filled with the innocence and the longing for love'. Gremaud found other connections with the present, looking at how the Romantic movement was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution. 'They were fighting against the way we were treating nature,' he says. 'They were artists who were angry with their world. And the world they were afraid of is the world in which we are living today.' For van Wissen, it's more of a personal bond. Last summer she finally went to see the ballet Giselle live for the first time, at the Paris Opera. 'I felt so connected to her,' she says. 'I had tears in my eyes the whole time.' Giselle... is at the Linbury theatre, Royal Opera House, London, 15-16 March, as part of the Dance Reflections festival. National Ballet of Japan performs Giselle at the Royal Opera House, London, 24-27 July (booking opens 19 March).
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guide #179: How National Theatre Live brought the magic of the stage to the cinema
Last month I went to the National Theatre to catch The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's campy, farcical comedy. But unlike other theatre visits, this time I was surrounded by a number of large cameras. This was not due to some crisis in audience etiquette, but because I was watching the live-capture of the onstage performance. As I was enjoying Ncuti Gatwa's Algernon pretending to play piano in a dazzling hot-pink dress, production teams in a number of trucks outside were frantically working to ensure the performance would be optimised for cinema screens across the world. This is, of course, the great operation of National Theatre Live. The initiative launched in June 2009 with Helen Mirren's Phèdre beamed into 70 cinemas across the UK, and has become a resounding success, now featuring in over 850 domestic cinemas and venues, and in thousands of cinemas across the globe. Last year, the theatre celebrated its 100th cinematic release with Nye starring Michael Sheen. With The Importance of Being Earnest opening in UK cinemas last night to an estimated audience of 45,000, and Dr Strangelove premiering next month, National Theatre Live has clearly become a firm fixture of the event cinema landscape. The success of the project was not always guaranteed. Initially, there was a lot of scepticism over whether the experience of watching theatre could truly be replicated on screen, or if the production could match up to Hollywood's ever-advancing cinematography. But as Leo Jordan, head of marketing at the National Theatre, tells me: 'Everybody who gives it a go says the same thing: that it works so amazingly. While we're not ever saying that we're better than going to the theatre in person, if you can't get there it is an amazing, alternative way of watching theatre.' And National Theatre Live shows are not only aired in cinemas – they are played in village halls, community centres, and even on a mobile screen that drives around the Scottish Highlands. What is the secret behind capturing plays for the screen? Director Sam Yates, whose National Theatre Live production Vanya, a one-man adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya starring Andrew Scott, says that the key is to 'give the audience the experience of being in the best seat in the house in the theatre, but also make it stand alone as a film within its own right'. Yates is particularly keen on the use of closeup cameras to translate a stage performance to a more filmic language. He says: 'I wanted a camera that would follow Andrew around on a mid [medium camera shot] so that you can capture everything in one shot, and then a camera that was an extreme closeup. So within that, we were able to create startling cinematic images, not just capture what works on the proscenium stage.' Jess Richardson, the head of production at National Theatre Live, talks about the collaborative nature of matching filming considerations with the artistic intent of the stage director. One important thing about capturing plays is that you make decisions for the audience on where they should look, unlike when they're gazing at a large, expansive stage, where they can choose when to lock in on the action or linger on a background detail. Richardson says that 'with captured theatre we're looking at mid shots or even cowboy shots [where the subject is framed from the mid-thigh to the top of their head] and telling an audience where to look – that's really important to make sure we're telling the story in the same way. So where is your eye drawn to on stage? Where's the action that the director wants you to be looking at?' Unsurprisingly, National Theatre Live is something of a mammoth operation – on a behind-the-scenes tour I'm amazed at the number of screens and buttons and codes that have to be handled during a production. But the production team have the benefit of camera rehearsals before the official live recording, which means that (touch wood) thus far they have avoided any real hiccups. National Theatre Live is also helped by the fact that, unlike in its earlier days, it is no longer a literal live broadcast – which involves a complex operation of trucks transmitting to a satellite and then transmitting to the venues. Richardson explains: 'From 2019 there was some research from our viewers that suggested that as long as they knew it had been captured live, it didn't necessarily have to be live. What they enjoyed was that it wasn't four shows pieced together – it was one night captured.' Truly live broadcast releases are therefore now a rarity. Nearly 16 years on, now an international success, how will National Theatre Live innovate further? It has already started putting productions on streaming services since experimenting with digital releases during the pandemic, and is now looking at other technology. AI is (understandably) a dirty word in entertainment these days but is nonetheless proving to be of invaluable assistance in the creation of smooth live productions. As Richardson says: 'You've seen in films and Hollywood where AI is being used to replace voices or improve accents – that's not a world for us. But when it comes to sound mixes and recordings there's so many AI programmes and softwares that can improve sound quality. How that will come to benefit more areas will remain to be seen over the next few years.' In any case, this revolution in event cinema has expanded the reach of British theatre across the globe (a recent Spanish-subtitled run of Vanya in Mexico has added new dates due to demand). Perhaps theatre is becoming an important feature of British soft power. Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion The Importance of Being Earnest is in cinemas across the UK now. If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
