Giselle might seem an artless little ballet: its story of love, betrayal and redemption narrated through the most staple of ballet conventions. Yet Marius Petipa’s choreography and Adolphe Adam’s score are supremely efficient at delivering the plot: we can’t miss the fact that Giselle is a peasant girl and Albrecht a posh boy in disguise, that gamekeeper Hilarion has figured out Albrecht’s secret, and that the telling of it will trigger tragedy.
Akram Khan’s new Giselle tells the same story, but updates it to a starkly contemporary setting. The peasants become a community of migrant workers, Albrecht and his tribe are the super rich, wearing their wealth in arrogant couture. Vincenzo Lamagna’s music weaves themes from Adam into an electro-orchestral score; the class divide between Albrecht and Giselle is represented by an implacable grey stone wall.
As a concept, this new Giselle has been intriguingly imagined, however as storytelling, it’s sometimes frankly rocky. Khan’s strengths lie in impressionistic dance theatre, and the specifics of this narrative are difficult for him to nail. It matters that we don’t properly see Albrecht’s true identity until the end of Act 1, and that key moments – Hilarion’s revelation and its effect on Giselle – don’t register clearly enough on stage. In terms of basic narrative nuts and bolts, there’s a whole snagging list that Khan has to address.
The power of this evening lies less in the plotting than in the visually transfixing world created on stage. The wall is used to monumental effect: a sinister class barrier in Act 1, it becomes a portal into the industrial hell of Act 2, where Giselle and the ghosts of other betrayed women dance vengeance on their men.
Khan’s choreography rises to the scale of his set design. He uses his 40-strong cast to impressive effect, not only in the big, thrumming ensemble dances, but also in the elaboration of choreographic imagery; the fluid weave of bodies that rise protectively around the dying Giselle, the human threshing machine created by the Wilis as they wield their warrior staves, their feet drumming lethally on pointe.
Stylistically, Khan has steeped himself in the language of ballet, but reinvented it with a rhythmic and visceral heft and a new gestural vocabulary. Of the principals, Myrtha (Stina Quagebeur) is spectacularly good, her spectral pointe work overlaid with witchy movements of the hands and face. Albrecht (Isaac Hernández) is, disappointingly, the least vividly imagined. But his love duets with Giselle (Alina Cojocaru) are tender and fresh-minted and she herself is a beautifully judged combination of vulnerability, curiosity and earthiness. Most arresting is Cesar Corrales’s satirical, thwarted Hilarion: one of the ballet’s outstanding moments is the duet where he’s confronted by a violently sobbing, furious Giselle.
The whole ballet is magnificently danced and it is, I think, a gift for ENB. The production may have problems, but the original Giselle went through numerous revisions before settling into a classic, and Khan’s version can and should be fixed.
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Giselle is at the Palace theatre, Manchester, until 1 October. Box office: 0844 871 3019. Then touring.
