High emotion inevitably surrounded this production of Giselle by Alexei Ratmansky, once artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and now resident in New York, but raised in Kyiv, a Ukrainian passport holder and a powerful advocate against the horror of the Ukrainian war.
It’s performed by a company of Ukrainian dancers now based at the Hague, some of whom have fled their homeland, all of whom have friends and family still there. The sharp reality of events was made brutally clear by the fact that on the eve of the London premiere, the Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Oleksandr Shapoval was killed during combat in the Donetsk region.
In such a context, the decision to assert the cultural importance of dance and dancers to Ukraine is profoundly powerful. “Dancers have short careers but long traditions,” as the programme notes, and the evening movingly celebrates both.
What Ratmansky has done is use his dance detective instincts to mount a production of Giselle that takes it back to its 1841 origins. You can argue whether this is always useful or dramatic, but it’s unquestionably fascinating to see a version of a familiar ballet that strips some things away and adds ingredients that are entirely unfamiliar from more recent versions.
Some of the interpolations alter the effect of the ballet. Here, Giselle doesn’t kill herself in despair when she discovers her much-loved fiance, Albrecht, is engaged to another, as she does in Peter Wright’s version; she dies of a broken heart in a scene that is full of poignant stillness and not much running around. At the close, even more strikingly, she does not just vanish back into the grave having saved Albrecht from the Wilis, the vengeful female spirits who seek to kill him, leaving him with the legacy of his betrayal. Instead, Giselle sinks into the earth with a gesture of supreme forgiveness, giving the living a chance of a future unburdened by the mistakes of the past.
Some of the restored mime is heavy-handed and a bit silly. Some of the new – or rather, old – sequences, such as a fugue for the Wilis after Giselle and Albrecht seek sanctuary by the cross of her tomb, feel laboured. But the entire thing is danced with heartfelt understanding by dancers who have only been working together (under the direction of Igone de Jongh) for three months and who are performing in costumes that are borrowed from Birmingham Royal Ballet and – when it comes to the minor characters – look as if they have come from a child’s dressing-up box.
There isn’t much strength in depth, but the corps de ballet, with their graceful arms and supple backs, are charming as gambolling peasants and as the misty Wilis, moving in delicate unison. At both performances I saw, the guest principals were exceptional. On Tuesday, Christine Schevchenko, from American Ballet Theatre, was a gentle Giselle opposite Oleksii Tiutiuunyk’s Albrecht, his entrechats as high as his emotions.
Wednesday brought the treat of Alina Cojocaru, always a wonderful Giselle, returning to the role opposite Alexander Trusch’s dashing prince, and filling the stage with such dramatic, suffering intensity that she added an extra level of meaning and feeling to an already charged evening. In the second act, she was just sublime, flying across the stage with a freedom and artistry that wordlessly underlined Ratmansky’s case for the value of art as an essential ingredient of life itself.
