The uncertainty last week over Alina Cojocaru's fitness to appear in Giselle may have suggested to her fans a fleeting, anxious parallel between art and life. The ballet's fragile, dance-mad heroine suffers from a chronically weak heart and her refusal to sit still contributes a small part to her tragedy.
Cojocaru has no such ailment, but she has been performing an astonishingly fierce schedule on an injured foot, and there was talk of her being ordered to rest. Yet while watchers of Cojocaru's meteoric career might worry about the possibility of early burn out, no one on Thursday could have wished that she was not on stage. For Giselle is unquestionably one of the roles for which she will go down in history.
When I saw her debut last year I was not sure if she would ever be able to repeat the unguarded intensity of that first performance. The artless, shiny radiance of Giselle's love for Albrecht and the broken disorientation of her mad scene felt less like acting than possession. This season's interpretation certainly looks more deliberately crafted, starting with a flirtatious tone and musically playful dancing, and only slowly releasing its deeper springs of emotion. Yet Cojocaru's mad scene is danced with a violently detailed realism that is now far more particular to her than last time round.
It is in act II though that Cojocaru's genius comes most into its own. As the dead Giselle she resonates, exquisitely, to Albrecht's every gesture, and the tragedy of her love becomes beautifully explicit in the purity of her dancing. Her movements are so refined and articulate that they seem paradoxically beyond her control, barely tethered to the earth. She certainly looks far beyond the grasp of a human embrace.
Cojocaru's Albrecht is Johan Kobborg, a dancer as perfect for her as he is for the ballet. Beneath his mild, handsome looks and heroically elegant dancing Kobborg always suggests there is unstable emotional ground, liable to erupt with hot passions and slow broiling obsessions. He not only convinces us of Albrecht's allure for Giselle but makes us believe his character's destructive delusion that he can actually possess her.
Best of all though is the calibre of his partnering which allows Cojocaru to appear as if she is simultaneously floating on currents of air and on the rise and fall of the music. This is a partnership that feels as if it were forged in another lifetime and it cannot help but make some of the cast look half formed and inept. But Zenaida Yanowsky is a Myrtha of thrilling extremes, both icy and baroque and there are some cameo gems lurking in the acting ensemble.
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