Giselle: Life After Death
Bass Concert Hall,
Oct. 11
Gina Patterson floated across the stage on her toes, a simple and breathtaking defiance of gravity. This is why we come to the ballet, for moments not merely beautiful but seemingly impossible. Fog and silvery moonlight spilled across the stage along with this heartbroken girl; as the title character, she had just died — but Giselle the ballet had finally come alive. As staged by Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills and Associate Artistic Director Michelle Martin, this tale of an impossible love between a peasant girl of the German countryside and a dashing duke, originally performed in 1841, showed its age in the first act. As Giselle fell madly and deeply for a disguised (and already betrothed) Lord Albrecht, characters cluttered the stage, many of them cartoonish in their presentation. I found myself sighing deeply, wondering, “Who’s dancing? And why?” With the elaborate fairy-tale sets built by the Kirov Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, and without the fireworks and mad swirl of limbs of modern ballet, the production seemed antique, almost quaint — that is, until the second half. But after our heroine died of a broken heart, she joined the ranks of the avenging angels known as the Wilis, spirits of scorned brides who exact revenge for their broken hearts by luring men like Albrecht to their deaths. Then, the company reveled in the dark beauty and the accelerated drama. The stage flooded with bodies, moving in time and in step, the sheer number and unison of movement providing evidence of Ballet Austin’s continued growth as a company and the ambitiousness of this production. However, in their solos, many of the supporting players (male and female) seemed all too human — here a leaden leap, there a leg trembling, desperate to extend. Giselle’s soaring moments were infrequent and came late in the action, but just as Giselle saves her duke from peril, it is Patterson — and her otherworldly grace — who saved Giselle the production.
This article appears in Stan Knee.