(374) The History of 'Giselle' with Alastair Macaulay
On today's episode of 'Conversations On Dance', we are joined by Alastair Macaulay, esteemed critic and historian for the performing arts. Alastair previously joined us for a deep dive into the history of Balanchine's classic 'Serenade'; today he returns for critical analysis of one of the oldest and most beloved full lengths in ballet history, 'Giselle'. Alastair will be presenting a seminar on the same subject at the New York Public Library Bruno Walter Auditorium on Friday, December 1st. Tickets are sold out, but a standby line will form 45 minutes before with available seats distributed on a first come first served basis.
Explore Alastair's dance musings on his website, alastairmacaulay.com.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:00]:
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Michael Sean Breeden [00:00:52]:
And I'm Michael Sean Breeden. And you're listening to Conversations on dance. On today's episode of conversations on dance, we are joined by Alastair McAuley, esteemed critic and historian for the performing arts. Alistair previously joined us for a deep dive into the history of Ballington's classic Serenade. Today, he returns for critical analysis of one of the oldest and most beloved full lengths in ballet history, giselle. Alastair will be presenting a seminar on the same subject at the New York public library bruno Walter auditorium on Friday, December 1. Tickets are sold out, but a standby line will form 45 minutes before, with available seats distributed on a first come, first serve basis.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:33]:
Alistair, welcome back. Back by popular demand. Every time we have an episode with you, people always say they want more. People loved our rerecord of the Serenade episode, and you're always great with suggestions after that about what ballets would make good episodes. And so today we're going to focus on giselle. Let's talk about giselle.
Alastair Macaulay [00:02:01]:
Well, this is partly an old story, and obviously Giselle is an old ballet. As you know, I've done at the library, the library performing dance, a series of seminars on individual works. And our first session on Serenade was just about and you're still not pronouncing it. The right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:02:24]:
Gotta learn balance, said serenade. So can you. I know we did one on Serenade. We had already done one on sleeping beauty and one on swan lake, and then we had a new director of the dance division, linda Murray, who's a wonderful woman. And I said, look, I can think of nine different ideas for seminars and individual works. You're the new director. Can you choose or encourage? And not knowing me, she said, oh, of yours, I would choose giselle. And so we were able to assemble a three day seminar.
Alastair Macaulay [00:02:58]:
And people with one person you've often interviewed, Doug Fullington, was in New York because he's an expert on many aspects of 19th century ballet, as you know. And he and Marion Smith are particularly concentrated on chisel. They have been the main research assistants and production advisors to Peter Bowl in his pacific northwest chisel, which was, I think, the first important 21st century look at how at the 19th century giselle taking away a lot of the 20th century accretions. So they were the right people to ask and they were just in New York at that time. But we brought in a lot of other connoisseurs and experts and looked at films going back to specifics of her in 1932 silent Margot Fontaine 1937 silent mark of her in the early forty s and then looking at sound films like Yolandova with the Bolshoi in 1956 and then just talked about what giselle is now. Normally these seminars at the library then lead within a few months to an event that I present at the library with colleagues, if possible. I can't remember why life interrupted me, but I just wasn't able to present that giselle as a show, so to speak, in the Bruno Valta Auditorium within the following year. As you know, I'm now mainly based back in London, but the librarian reminded me that they'd like me to do something and I suggested that we finally used our giselle material.
Alastair Macaulay [00:04:30]:
I don't know what I meant by that now because of course I've now got into researching giselle and looked at all the goodies in the library. There are more goodies than I ever knew about, which is so in particular, I'm sure I've mentioned this in terms of Serenade and other ballets. There was a wonderful Balletta main Nutcase, and perhaps all true Belletta mains are Nutcases called Victor Jessam. And between the 1940s and 50s he made it his mission to try to film all the great productions of the day and try to film them silently but edit them into order. And in some cases he tried to concentrate on one particular star, like all of his Sleeping Beauty more or less features Margot Fontaine as Aurora, sometimes as the Lilac Fairy. You're watching Beryl Grace. Sometimes you're seeing Berry Hostel, but it's always Margot Fontaine. Except curiously for the last second when I think you're seeing Maurice Shearer don't ask me how she got in.
Alastair Macaulay [00:05:32]:
He put together Giselle, just act Two, and he was in love with the famous performances by Alicia Markova and Anton Dolan and they had been legendary from the early 40s. In fact, they'd been doing it in London since the 30s, but in the early 40s they were in their primes and he began to film them but the productions kept sort of changed d what's the word? Sidetracking him. And so he also, when you look at the library catalog, it just is Markova and Darlin and occasionally some other performers. And at first when I looked at it, it just didn't look very impressive. And there's a lot of the willys and none of the willys. MIRT and the willys are terribly interesting, only really this autumn that I start to look carefully and I thought, oh my God. This is footage from the early fifty s of Margot Fontaine dancing live with Michael soames at her most beautiful, we can argue about whether she was at one of nature's giselles. She doesn't have great elevation, but that's an interesting point to debate.
Alastair Macaulay [00:06:34]:
And then I looked at one of the other ones and I think I thought, well, I think she's in the same Royal Ballet production, but it's not Fontaine, so who is it? And I think there's one bit of Maira Sheera live and really dancing, unlike the Sleeping Beauty film. So you think, oh, my God, how interesting to see Maurice, if it is Shearer. And I think there's another clip that is probably Via Elvin. She was the Bolshei ballerina who joined the Sadler's Wells Ballet or Royal Ballet straight after the war. So how amazing to have these clips. And then you see and Darlin. And then there's quite a lot of footage from the ballet rise to Monte Carlo of Alexandra de Nieleva, who simply is not known as gizzazal at all. And she only seems to have taken up the role in her mid forty s.
Alastair Macaulay [00:07:16]:
And in some ways she looks thoroughly old, but she is Danilova, and when she knows how to make an effect, she certainly does. I don't know how often you've ever watched a ballerina who in some ways is too old for a role, but important, it's fascinating because you watch some bits thinking, this is electrifying. Oh, how embarrassing about that Arabic. Oh, how amazing that that's what it's like watching Danilova. It might even be that way, perhaps, watching Markova. Markova certainly is not like any giselle of today, but as far as I can see, Danilova always took class and of course, was a famous teacher. Markova probably was one of the laziest great ballerinas in history. Nobody ever really saw her take class, and she just kept some of her steps in brilliant shape.
Alastair Macaulay [00:08:08]:
And other ones you just can see the leg got lower and the jumps got lower, but she seems to have worked just particularly on her feet. And just as you're watching an Act Two, thinking, well, I bet she was wonderful ten years before this live film, then suddenly she does the supersource or the Rendezvous, sote and you think, oh, my God, she can really do this. How beautiful. I'm trying to put together, really, a compare and contrast program based on all these different giselles. We also have act One of specificsva, who was perhaps the most legendary giselle before Markavura, perhaps, of the whole 20th century. And I don't know how I'm going to shape all this material together because there is so lot. It's a huge amount. I'm, on the whole, not going to show I think, well, I'm going to show a minimum of giselles from the last 40 years.
Alastair Macaulay [00:09:02]:
I think people who come attempted to look for their favorites like Natalia Osipova or Diana Vishniova or Alina Kajakaro or 40 years ago, Natalia Mccarrave, and they're all great. And there is footage of them you can see just about all of them on YouTube, actually. And just for that reason, I'm going to leave them out, except maybe just to show what, say, with Giselle's Act One variation, I might show McCarver doing it to show how it fits to music and in color and how we see it now and then show what it's like when somebody's doing it nearer the original choreography. And we'll show Maybe Lansky's or Doug Wellington's reconstruction of it from the steps. And there are some important changes of steps. And then look at what Fontaine and Markova and Specific were doing, which are all much closer to the notation than the version we now normally see.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:09:59]:
Right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:10:00]:
For example, I mean, I can argue about the opening arabesque of Giselle's variation. The notation isn't quite clear there. But there is evidence going back that it began with the arms honor in fifth position. So she goes and she steps with her arms around her head. Not the usual open, fast arabesque arms that we often see, which is but much more striking. And this is something that I've investigated recently with the American British ballerina Cynthia Harvey. One of your invitees is the manege at the end of the Act One variation. Normally, it's just a standard manage of PK turns going round, round the stage.
Alastair Macaulay [00:10:39]:
That's brought in by the Kiroff and Bolshe in recent years. McCarver maybe was the first person to do it in the west. What Giselle used to do was a diagonal of very tight turns gained sort of PK on different legs. And when Margot Fontaine coached Cynthia Harvey, she said, it's like a whirlwind of turns, but they're harder than the usual PK turns. You're just going down a diagonal. It's much tighter and faster. And when I asked Cynthia Harvey about them, I said, Why does it feel more right? And she said, well, it is harder. And she said, All I can tell you is, when you are doing it, I haven't got her words in front of me.
Alastair Macaulay [00:11:23]:
You're much into that intoxicated feeling of almost delirious excitement that Giselle is feeling at that point. You're into the high that will soon crash, because not long after this variation, she'll find that everything is wrong.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:11:41]:
Right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:11:42]:
It was so interesting to take a ballerina through the feeling in the steps. How do you feel psychologically about them? And you can only ask about many ballerinas after they've stopped dancing. That's when they start to think, oh, I realized what I was thinking. I just didn't like to word it when I was performing since when I had such a good time, I'm going to do it with other roles.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:12:03]:
Right. It's just so fun to get into these changes with you. I mean, we've talked about things in Swan Lake that have become drastically different, or, of course, in Serenade. But what would you think is something that audiences identify with Giselle that present day audiences identify as being an essential part of the ballet that absolutely had no business being in there in 1841, would not have been there.
Alastair Macaulay [00:12:36]:
Oh, that's interesting. Well, I can tell you something that I'm not sure if this is the best answer to a question. I'll probably keep coming back to that very good question, but something I discovered from Doug Fullington that several people of my generation who've been watching Giselle longer than I have, who just didn't want it to be true. There is a variation that we now know was added by Petipa, Marius Pettipa, probably no, maybe an earlier choreographer. We're just not sure. Somebody probably in the 1860s added a variation in Act Two for Giselle. And it's what we now see that is after Albrecht's Big variation, giselle comes running in and pleads with Mirto, saying, Please spare him. And if you see a Russian Giselle, she does it with an armful of lilies.
Alastair Macaulay [00:13:24]:
One or two west owners do it with lilies. I think originally she just made a beseeching gesture, and then she dances. She's kind of forced into dance by Mirta. And then gradually her energy changes and then stepanov notation, which was made, I think, in 1899. Doug told me there, says she lures him. And this is the moment when Giselle, despite her love for him, is turning into a willie. That is, she is somebody who is obliged, but by instinct, to dance him to death. And if you think Giselle there's that mysterious thing that normally never makes sense.
Alastair Macaulay [00:14:04]:
She goes right over to him and then does a gesture that says, Come beckoning him. Well, normally you think logically, no, you should be encouraging him to lie down.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:14:14]:
And have another sit down.
Alastair Macaulay [00:14:17]:
But no, she summons him up. And I remember when I put this into The New York Times, I don't know, eight years ago or something, both Joan Acicella and Claudia Peppont said, we just didn't want to hear that. We like to think that Giselle is just dancing selflessly and trying to spare him. We don't like to be reminded of the willy side of Giselle, but that probably was there in 1841. So that's not a full answer to your question. I don't mean that the dance was added after 1841, but that idea that Giselle is she doesn't want to dance for him and dance him to death, and she can't help it, sometimes she does want to.
Speaker E [00:14:54]:
I feel like there was something that we've talked about with you in the past with this, or maybe at the very end of the ballet has looked different. There's been, like, different versions. And then maybe there was something too, about her, like going into the grave. I feel like there's something that we talked about with you.
Alastair Macaulay [00:15:07]:
I'm trying to quite right. I think we talked about it in 2020 when I first posted my big entry on my website about Giselle, and I now call it 94 Questions about Giselle and 94 Answers. Actually, it really should be called 94 Questions about Giselle and 1000 Answers. But Doug and Marion are very hot on this, that Giselle doesn't end with Giselle simply disappearing back to the grave. Originally, Albrecht tries to hold on to Giselle and then, just because he's tired, she's fainting. He puts her down on a knoll of grass, or grassy knoll, as we might say, and she just sinks into the ground. The ground opens up to receivers slowly. And as she goes, Bertilde, his fiance, is seen appearing at the back of the forest, and Giselle mimes to him, there's your fiance.
Alastair Macaulay [00:16:08]:
You must marry her. I will it. And she's doing that despite his reluctance as she disappears into the ground. And the ballet ends, really, with Batild coming to him saying, I understand. I will console you. I will look after you. It's really important that Batilde is not a bitch. Normally, we see her as the snooty aristocrat.
Alastair Macaulay [00:16:30]:
No, that's a 20th century idea, really. If you think about Giselle, those two women meet and it's like no other scene, I think, in 19th century ballet where the aristocrat meets the peasant girl and they have that funny moment when Giselle tugs at Batilde's dress. But Batilde doesn't look snoozely at her. She just starts a real conversation. How do you make your dresses? And Giselle says, Well, I sew mine. And then they talk like girls, and they start to talk about, what do you like? Giselle says, I like dancing. And then Bettyilde says, Are you in love? And they do. The fact that these two people from different classes are sharing things, they're more or less the same age is so touching.
Alastair Macaulay [00:17:11]:
And then if you see a proper production, giselle then says with her mother, would you like to come inside our cottage? Which is so touching. There are some productions, of course, then aristocrats wouldn't go into the cottage anyway. So that's one whole twists of the ending of the ballet. Another thing is, there was more comedy originally in Giselle, and I think Marion is very keen on this, that act two doesn't begin with the strokes of midnight just to give us a spectral Dracula type atmosphere. You see Gamekeepers and huntsmen in the forest men, and they're playing dice. They're just going to the forest because it's any old place where you enjoy yourselves doing manly type things. And only hilarious knows that there's a more serious alarming side here. And he has come to see Giselle's grave and they kind of make light of him and then that suddenly, out of the blue, one or two willys start to appear before midnight and they will get a bit alarmed.
Alastair Macaulay [00:18:14]:
But the first, they don't take them seriously. So part of that scene is entirely comic, but a little bit ambiguous.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:18:24]:
Yeah. Could we go back and kind of maybe get an idea of what was the ballet world like when Giselle premiered. What were the circumstances under which it became a success initially? Was it groundbreaking, or was this what we were looking at generally today? And it just happened to be a hit. What were some of the early years of Giselle like?
Alastair Macaulay [00:18:49]:
It's a really good question. When I first saw Giselle and I saw a cast I would do anything to see again now, with Lindsay Moore and Rudolph Nirad, I was a music snob. And I wasn't wild about Giselle because I thought all this, that music was just too trite. But there is something in even the music of Giselle that I realized was something of a breakthrough. It's an incredibly seamless score, and if you compare it to many of the later ballets that we so admired by Tchaikovsky and Gladzanov, they are full of cut and dry numbers, numbers where somebody dances and stops dancing and the music stops or starts with that. Giselle has very few such stops and starts. You see the wheelies dancing and then Giselle and Albrecht dance sort of in front of them and then the wheel is trying to separate them. Then Giselle and Albrecht come together again and then Giselle does a solo out of that and it's all merging into one musical item.
Alastair Macaulay [00:19:47]:
Now, how new that was in 1841, I'm not quite sure. But I feel that Adolf Adam, the composer, was moving into a kind of structural coherence that Wagner would be picking up on quite soon on in opera, trying not to have cut and dry formal numbers like arias and opera, just trying to make it much more you. Apart from the peasant padded, which was not by him, there are only three formal variations with beginnings and ending in the whole of Giselle. And two of them were added after the original Giselle. They weren't part of the original structure. There was another padadour in Act One and the choreography has got lost. But Adam composed that had much more give and take. Giselle Albrecht.
Alastair Macaulay [00:20:38]:
Giselle Albrecht. But without ending any particular with any formal endings at the end of their solos.
Speaker E [00:20:44]:
What do we know about the creation of the story for the ballet, the plot?
Alastair Macaulay [00:20:49]:
Well, it's made, can you believe it, by a critic, the famous Tefiel Gutierre, who is an ultimate romantic east seat. And he had fallen in love with this young, young ballerina, Carlot Degreesi, who just joined bed in Paris and had joined the Paris Opera that year, 1841. And he was wondering about a vehicle for this woman. And he came home, pulled down a book by his friend, the German writer Heinrich Heiner, and it was a book on Germany, and it was full of legends. And there's one particular legend, which is of the villas. And so Gautier suddenly thought, oh, what a great subject for dancing. The legend is about these spirits who rise from the grave in forests at midnight and dance men to death. Now, there had been other ballets from the 1780s onwards which took dancing as a narrative subject matter, but they'd all been comic.
Alastair Macaulay [00:21:48]:
I don't think there'd be many of them. I think this is the first ballet that takes dance itself and makes it a narrative theme that is tragic and serious. Giselle is dancing. You've all seen it. Giselle is dancing with her girlfriends and with Albrett, and her mother comes out and says, I'm worried about all this dancing. And Giselle just can't be stopped from dancing. It's what she loves. And normally we see a mime scene, and not normally enough of the mime scene because people tend to dilute it, but there's a mime in which Giselle is a little frightened by what her mother says about you shouldn't dance, and so forth.
Alastair Macaulay [00:22:27]:
Actually, in the original, it's quite clear on the music. The music is very expressive. Giselle just laughs it away and say, oh, I don't believe these old wife's tales which, when Beth of the mother talks about the I'm not I don't believe all that rubbish, so she's going to go on dancing. That's what she lives for. But her mother is right that if you dance like that, there is the danger. You will love and dance will connect the wrong ways and you will die young and you will rise from the grave. I think behind all of that there is an older myth, and I can't prove it, but there is a famous myth which Lincoln Kirstein wrote about in his book Dance Short History in 1934. Other people have, too.
Alastair Macaulay [00:23:12]:
It's now been resurrected in a number of recent 21st set books, including a wonderful novel called The Dance Tree, which I can't remember the author of right now, but it came out in Britain, I think, in 2021. And it's an old novel about dance mania in the Rhineland, which was a historical phenomenon that at several points in the Middle Ages, people, especially women, got intoxicated by dancing and they danced for not hours but days on end until they started to drop dead. Their feet were bleeding and in some cases they were put into group graves. And nobody can explain this kind of mania that happened. The most famous was in Strasbourg in, I think, the early 15 hundreds. But there are other cases of this, and I think it connects to the medieval belief of the dance of death, that death itself swept people up like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I think Giselle connects to all of this, draws on deep spirit.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:24:20]:
Right? It's so funny. I don't know. You didn't post about this recently, did you? Because I just read about it. It must have been maybe it was something Halloween related, but I literally just read about this. I had never heard of it. And in the Strausberg situation, that was.
Alastair Macaulay [00:24:35]:
Like dozens of I've been dying to, because I just finished this novel, The Dance Tree, about a month ago and I think there's so much to say, but I don't think I've yet posted.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:24:44]:
Yeah, it's so wild.
Alastair Macaulay [00:24:49]:
The novel suggests that actually the reason why these women got into dance mania, because really, it was a release, and in some ways a joyous release from the terrible constrictions of the Christian church, where women in particular were obliged to be conformist and to do whatever they were told and not given any freedom whatsoever. And it's just the time, of course, that Protestantism would soon affect the church anyway. Dance meaning comes for the same reasons, but this is a theory. We can't quite prove it.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:25:30]:
Let's talk a little bit about Giselle's influence, both immediately after its premiere and up until the present day. The premiere was a hit, but did you start to see it impacting the works of other choreographers or dancers at the time? What was its influence around then?
Alastair Macaulay [00:25:50]:
Well, it was a hit and it had a secret. I mentioned Goethe. He merely thought up the story, and he only really thought up the story for Act Two. And he handed it over to somebody who was a professional writer of scenarios, and that was Julie Vernoid, Vernoi de Saint. And he wrote other ballets, too. And then they brought in the composer who we mentioned, Adolf Adam. But Carla Tagrizi had an important lover at the time, Jul Perot, who had done some choreography for the previous five, six years. But it was in the 1840s that his career took off.
Alastair Macaulay [00:26:25]:
And he wasn't named in the original Giselle because he wasn't yet on contract to the Paris Opera. But the next year he took Greasy and Giselle to London and it was a great hit there. And he also presented one of the other great romantic ballerinas, Fanny Elsler, in it. And of course, she presented it with more drama and more made more of the mad scene, more tragedy. She also did it in Russia. Then Perot's own career took off and he made a ballet that we unfortunately almost never see. Now the Bolshei has done it. I once saw it with what was then the Mali Ballet and now the Michaelowski Ballet, Esmeralda.
Alastair Macaulay [00:27:03]:
And Esmeralda, which I think is 1844, is another vehicle for Ja Greezy. One of Greece's particular gifts that made her different from some other romantic ballerinas was that she seemed to dance for dance's sake. And this Perot had enough skill to realize that's a great narrative thing. So Esmeralda is a professional dancer. She's a gypsy who dances for people's entertainment. She has four different men in love with her for different reasons, only one of whom she is in love with. But she guess what? She marries another just to save his life. It's a very complicated and fabulous story.
Alastair Macaulay [00:27:41]:
And in one of the great scenes, she comes running in with this man who's just become her husband, that she doesn't really love him. And she finds this is like a twist on Giselle that she's being forced to dance professionally at the betrothal of her own fiance. No, sorry, not her own fiance. The man she loves.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:28:01]:
She loves. Right. Wow.
Alastair Macaulay [00:28:04]:
And it's very, of course, like Bayadair and Petiper would take this idea and put it into Bayadair 40, 30 years later. But the Russians danced both Esmeralda and Bayadair. There was a nice difference between them and they danced chazelle as well. But really, those should be seen as a trigger. They all have the idea of dancing tragically because it's your profession and it's your passion, but also because though your heart is breaking, you must go on dancing Giselle. Bayard.
Speaker E [00:28:36]:
Can we talk a little bit about the music a little bit more in depth? I'm curious to know kind of what that process looked like and how much collaboration there maybe was.
Alastair Macaulay [00:28:46]:
Well, as far as we can tell, Adam was working fairly fast and occasionally he used I think it was one bit where he used from an earlier ballet, but he also composed more than was required by the premier. Greasy got a slight injury. She danced on her birthday. I'm trying to think, was she 21 years old? I forget. And they had to leave out some of the music for her in Act One. He was a brilliant professional. He also made operas as well as ballets. And he went on into the composing.
Alastair Macaulay [00:29:28]:
The more you analyze the score mansky was very struck by this when he staged it for the Borsche in 2019 and then reworked it for the United Ukrainian Ballet last year. That almost every moment in the score, at least in Adam's music for the score, has a dramatic reason for it. And one of the great rouse you can get into in Giselle is, how does she die? And as you know, there are three possible different reasons why she might die. She may die because she's been dancing too much, which is what her mother warned. She may die because she picks up that sword in the mad scene and drives it into her heart. And some giselles have definitely made that crucial. It was very important to Lindsay Moore that she committed suicide. But Ratmansky points out there's just no moment when you hear her stabbing herself or anything like that.
Alastair Macaulay [00:30:24]:
Everything else, particularly the mad scene, is so clear, moment for moment. And really, he says, if you listen to the score, it's just suggesting that she in her rather beautiful and sad mad scene, that her heart just breaks this wild intensity of different emotions. And then it's just too.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:30:47]:
You know the matt scene is always something that I find really interesting. It's a hard arc to pull off. I forget who it was. Maybe Gelsi says in her book or something that from the second that her giselle came out, she needed you to know that this was someone that was capable of going crazy because it could be. Know. Giselle is also the life of the party. Everyone loves her. She's the favorite peasant of the village.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:31:13]:
So how do we make that work? How is it that we can buy the scene?
Alastair Macaulay [00:31:19]:
That's such a good question. I don't know of the Giselles you've seen, but there are some Giselles who play Giselle so quiet, quite so shyly and fragile passively, that it drives Marion Smith nuts, because all the evidence, just as you say, she's the life of the party. She's the most outgoing person in the village and very much loved outgoing. She is a bit shy, to be sure, when she's first alone with Albrecht. And there is all that leading up to the daisy, but that's just maidenly modesty. But she's also very happy with him when she's in the dance move and she says, Please dance with me, she's not fending him away. I love. There's a mind gesture that you've all seen when she suddenly looks straight into his eyes and Albrecht, being an aristocrat, puts his hand on his heart and does that big up gesture, saying I swear I love you, and down his arm.
Alastair Macaulay [00:32:18]:
And I think Riddish is saying, that's not how we do it in the village. And she goes and picks the petals of the daisy. And the daisy, in a way, tells the truth, but isn't how much Albrecht is or isn't in love with. Here's a lovely ambiguity of the story. Every Albrecht can make his own choice. To some degree, he is deeply in love with her, but perhaps only realizes how much in love with her he is in act two, when he is also now suffused with remorse for having caused her death.
Speaker E [00:32:49]:
It's so interesting when we're talking about the different people who dance these roles. They really have such an opportunity to put their own spin on it, to really create the story for themselves, even within the constraints of the ballet. But I wonder, as you're watching all these videos, you've really done this deep dive. Is there one interpretation of Giselle and Albrecht in particular that you feel like are for you like the ultimate?
Alastair Macaulay [00:33:16]:
That's such a neat question, and I don't have a neat answer.
Speaker E [00:33:20]:
It's too many, probably.
Alastair Macaulay [00:33:22]:
Well, I think there have been two points in my life where I saw a whole series of great results in the same month or so. For example, in 1977, before I was even a critic, london had Natalia Mclarever and Eva Evdokimova both dancing it with Rudolph Nirev doing a whole week of performances. And Mcclarver was in some ways the most glamorous and ethereal and spiritual ballerimina of the period. But Eva Evdokimova had an even more billowy quality, and some people found her even more perfect for romantic roles. With the lightness of Giselle, it was certainly a luxurious contrast. Then we had Abt, came to London, mccarv advanced it. Now with Borisniknikov. Then we had Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bohonez, who were two of the greatest technicians you could ever see, but really knew that giselle wasn't just about technique.
Alastair Macaulay [00:34:14]:
And then we got Gal Kirkland doing it also with Brycevov, and with that happened those three performances in two days. And Gelsi really the ultimate, fragile giselle. And you loved her, and you loved her fragility. And then this extraordinary, luminous, spectral quality that developed in Act Two. I wish I'd seen her more than once. That was then. And I wish I remembered my memories, so to speak, better from all those years ago. But then in recent years, and Michael, you may have seen at least one of these interpretations.
Alastair Macaulay [00:34:48]:
Abt, I think, three years running. Presented alina Kojakaru, Diana Vishnova and Natalia Osipova. And I just remember thinking, this is let me go back to 1977, after I'd seen that luxury four or five giselles. Then I watched the touring Royal Valley saddle as well as Royal Valley as it was then. It's now Birmingham Royal Valley. And an almost forgotten dancer called Galena Samserva did the greatest Act One I've ever seen. And you just had a sheer, touching acting. It was the greatest mad scene I've ever seen.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:35:21]:
Wow.
Alastair Macaulay [00:35:22]:
Just heart. Your heart was beating with every moment. And I believe it was the first one she had done with the company of that role. And when the curtain came down, apparently all the dancers just gazed and started to burst into applause. They couldn't believe how touching and how real they had made it in a way that taught me giselle is just so open to different ways of doing it. Then with Kojikaro, Osapova, Vishnova, they did it together, so to speak, in a weekend of performances. I think in was it 2011, 2012 and 2013, I might have got those years wrong, but just around there. I think my favorite between the three changed each year.
Alastair Macaulay [00:36:03]:
One year was who was the most touchingly, fragile, adorable winning. She just caught your heart from the moment she came out of the cottage door and never let go of it. The one who had just stormed New York before I moved there for the Times job in 2005 was Diana Vishnuva and said, this is the ultimate giselle. When I was watching her in 2007, 2000, and whenever I wasn't, yes, smitten with her win in those years, when she was dancing at the same time as Osipova and Klajakaro, I thought, well, she's very, very beautiful, but I might love her more in other contexts. But the last year, I remember thinking, oh, my God, where she takes off in Act Two, that to me became then the ultimate chazelle. Meanwhile, I think everyone's who watched Osipova, particularly in her Abt debut, which was 2009, there were individual performances. And I don't think it happens every time with Osipova at all. When she's right, she's so on.
Alastair Macaulay [00:37:09]:
She's so brilliantly focused in every moment. And of course, she has electrifying elevation, which she makes spiritual in Act Two, so that, for many people was the definitive Shazal of our time. But I couldn't quite call a definitive on the except that she refocused the bally in a brilliant way that I had not known at her debut. And she had a partnership with David Hallburg, too.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:37:41]:
I saw them do it, at least over the course of two years. I may have seen it three years running. I remember one of them had an injury at one point that they had to pull out of, unfortunately, but I just thought it was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. And I even forgave her for something that I thought would bother me otherwise. But her first variation in the second act, when you come out with the series of very fast hops without spotting, so it's difficult because you come out of that spotting. Yes. Hops and air vest. Yeah.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:38:16]:
And then you come out of that and you're dizzy. And then you do this series of what? Cisan assemble jumping. So you have the very fast turning and then you're jumping. She had the conductor distorted the music beyond recognition. So it was so fast, that fast, just like nonstop. And then she goes to the corner so that she can jump with her incredible elevation. And it's but it was like you just didn't care, because it was absolutely thrilling seeing her in both modes. And it didn't somehow didn't take you out of the experience.
Alastair Macaulay [00:38:58]:
I'm happy to tell you that you're in good company in the musical point you've just made. Balanchin said exactly the same about Alicia Markova. He had worked with her, he admired her, but by the time she became a big star with American Ballet Theatre doing giselle every year, he hated how she pulled about the music, speeding up some bits. And.
Speaker E [00:39:21]:
That'S so funny. I love.
Alastair Macaulay [00:39:26]:
Once I think he supervised giselle more than once. He did it both American Ballet briefly and then in Paris. But generally he resisted what giselle did to dancers because they became precious. They started to think that they were sacrosanct and divine and so forth, and they weren't good ensemble dancers.
Speaker E [00:39:48]:
Yeah, we may have already covered this, so stop me, but I'm just wondering, is there something specific that's been completely lost over time with giselle? Was there any additional moments or part of the story that we've just completely.
Alastair Macaulay [00:40:07]:
That'S the answer probably depends on the production you're watching.
Speaker E [00:40:10]:
Right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:40:10]:
I mean, there was a tradition, perhaps particularly from the Russians, not in Yolanova, but later on, of emphasizing the self sacrificial quality of giselle. And they would always play it with their neck most elongated, the Russian giselles, and with the head slightly leaning forwards, as know giselle is the victim. From the beginning, so many giselles were like that, and it's kind of maddening. If you prefer your giselle to be vital, you the giselle tradition where, as you said so well, she can be the life and soul of the party, but that isn't how it's always played. I'm nuts angry at the moment because the Royal Ballet has put in this program that Giselle kills herself with a sword and that's absolutely not. I can see why Peter Wright, the director of production, thinks that. One historian said that and Gautier himself, after the premiere, sometimes referred to Giselle killing herself. But actually at the beginning, all the original scenarios and the score make quite clear.
Alastair Macaulay [00:41:14]:
She dies, I think, of a broken yeah.
Speaker E [00:41:17]:
Yeah.
Alastair Macaulay [00:41:19]:
Goethe was very good at advising his own ballets in afterthought, and some of his reviews are like fantasies on rotted scene rather than accurate reporting. Just with your knowledge, you know it from the Miami production and you know it from American Ballet Theatre.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:41:35]:
Yes, that's primarily, yeah.
Alastair Macaulay [00:41:37]:
You haven't been able to see the Doug and Marion Peter Bowle production in Pacific North?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:41:42]:
No.
Alastair Macaulay [00:41:43]:
Did you watch on film, Ratmanskis?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:41:47]:
I've seen parts of it, yes.
Alastair Macaulay [00:41:49]:
I mean, he's got the luxury when actually in Gach, I think, two different casts when the production was new in 2019, the Bolsheva I don't know if it has been done since, you know, since Ukraine, since Ratmansky has become persona known grata in Russia.
Speaker E [00:42:03]:
Right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:42:04]:
But the production in its essence is the same as he now has given to the United Ukrainian Ballet. But I will say the Boscher had particularly beautiful designs which he hasn't yet been able to reproduce.
Speaker E [00:42:17]:
Right.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:42:19]:
At what point in history did this ballet become a sort of benchmark for star dancers? Like they had to conquer these roles in order the way that so many dancers now, of course, feel like that it's one of the ballets that is really the pinnacle of classical achievement.
Alastair Macaulay [00:42:40]:
I think it probably happened with Markova. Markova made her debut in it in 1934. She satisfied people who had seen the great specifics of her in London just two years before and she identified herself with a role. And though she did pull the music around, we gather from Balanchin, she just became the role that she could do best. And though her technique in some ways diminished, the jumps she could still do were extraordinary. And her quality of lightness went on doing it till the late fifty s and did it all around the world where she could. So that became a kind of what's the word? Yardstick for ballerina. Dumb.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:43:24]:
Right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:43:25]:
Lightness. Margot Fontaine was wrong for it, but she was so right for the acting, for the intensity of Gizzard's joy in life that she threw herself in. And age 17 made a huge sensation in London. And I hope we can show at the library on December the first the live footage of her dancing. Now, she couldn't do the hops on point in those days. She did later on and went on dancing. She fell till she was 50. In age 17.
Alastair Macaulay [00:43:53]:
She does most of the hops in fifth position on both does hop, hop, hop fifth. And I think she does one or two on single points and then goes back to fifth. I would advise any young, fragile giselle with weak feet to work that way anyway. And then I think maybe when the Bolshei came and Yolanova did her extraordinary giselle, which was so spontaneous, so lacking in ballerina mannerism, and so much connected with the Stanislavsky tradition of losing yourself in a role, then, oh, my God, giselle is larger than we ever realized. You can do it so many different so I think, for some people, the greatest test of a ballerina. It drives me nuts, because you two and I love the Valentine repertory. In 2007, I wrote a piece about Kieran Nichols, who I truly thought at that time was the greatest dancer, classical dancer in the world at the point of her retirement. And I got a reader writing in saying she hasn't danced giselle.
Alastair Macaulay [00:44:57]:
She can't be a Balamin by giselle.
Speaker E [00:45:05]:
I'm wondering I'm just thinking as I'm hearing about you doing this presentation, I'm thinking that if I were a dancer who danced giselle or was going to be dancing giselle, that I would certainly want to be there to hear all of this great and see all this footage that you've unearthed.
Alastair Macaulay [00:45:22]:
Thank you. Well, I think one or two dancers from Abt and New York City Ballet will be coming. It'll be fun with Abt ones who know their giselle and City Ballet ones who never get to dance giselle.
Speaker E [00:45:32]:
Right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:45:33]:
If you've ever seen it, there's a documentary that Anton Dolan made probably in his 70s. He was asked to coach Patty McBride and Helgi Tomason in Giselle. And because he had most of the great giselles of the century, he included footage of him visiting a specific when she was in her home, towards the twilight of her life. He interviews Alicia Markova. He goes to Yvette Chauvire. He gets Galena yulanova. Carla Fratchi, I think. Natalia Mccarva.
Alastair Macaulay [00:46:03]:
It's amazing to see this galaxy of ballerinas all talking about the role. I'm not sure McBride or Helgita Mason would have said they took from it, but you very much had the feeling that though they're important dancers, they are the students in this situation.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:46:18]:
Right, yeah. Wow, that's fascinating. I need to see that. That's incredible.
Alastair Macaulay [00:46:23]:
Contain refused to contribute, and I think politely she just said, I don't regard myself as a great chazelle. Now, I don't believe she meant that. I think she just didn't want to be in a competition type.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:46:38]:
We actually can we go back? I was just thinking about when you were talking about, I guess, giselle finding popularity in other countries or other cities. But I'm thinking when it was shown in London, is that the whole company would the company tour at that point? Because there is no formal classical ballet in London at that point. Right. Or how is this working? How does the ballet sure, what year you mean, but 42 or something.
Alastair Macaulay [00:47:09]:
42, yes. The year after. It was a kind of provisional ballet company at Her Majesty's Theater in London. You don't know much about the supporting dancers, but there was money. This was perhaps the most prestigious London theater. And so most years they could present maritali fanny Ulsla, fanny Chorito, carlot Agriza, greasy and Lucille Grand. Which is why in 18 44. 45, they presented that famous paddockatra where four star romantic gathering, the school danced together.
Alastair Macaulay [00:47:42]:
So there wasn't some kind of a company. Whether you and I could bear to look at the ballet, I wonder. And it is, I think, that London Giselle is one of the great research opportunities that I hope somebody will go into. We know about it from either guest's book, the Romantic Ballet in London, but I don't think anybody's looked up the score or any evidence for how the story was told in programs. I'm sure there's much more for the right historian to find out.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:48:12]:
When listening.
Alastair Macaulay [00:48:13]:
To me specifically for Dance Stitch in London in 1932, they put it on in a fairly tiny theater, the Savoy. Now, there were dancers there, probably at different levels. All of them were doing it for the first time, and probably none of them had ever seen it before. And if you look at the silent footage and you can see some of it on YouTube, it's kind of hilarious. When you look at the background people, because they honestly look as if they've never seen giselle before. They don't know how to the mother looks as if she's played by a man. And maybe she was, because Enriquetti played the mother in Russia. So maybe somebody is taking that role in London.
Alastair Macaulay [00:48:56]:
I don't know. Frederick Asher is playing Hilarian. You can't recognize him because there's so much makeup and beard and so forth. Now, there's a certain tradition for how when giselle goes mad, for how the crowd moves around her and people come, and as she moves across the stage, everybody rushes around her or stays away from her. None of that was clear in 1932.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:49:20]:
Oh, interesting.
Alastair Macaulay [00:49:21]:
They give specifics of a much more space. She's also, by the way, wearing a short dress that ends way above the knee.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:49:29]:
Candle.
Alastair Macaulay [00:49:32]:
So there just wasn't that tradition of how to do indeed, Pavlova, who had done it for Pertipa in Russia, she kept experimenting. She loved doing Giselle in the west, and at one point she did in Isadora Duncan Draperies just loose wow. Body coming to calf length, but none of the usual waist type things. So I think maybe mark of her in 1934 that people started to go back to the period look of Giselle in a sort of gently corseted dress that ends beneath the knee.
Speaker E [00:50:04]:
Are there any other things about the costuming that has really evolved, that's obviously so iconic? Now, what giselle wears, especially in the first act.
Alastair Macaulay [00:50:14]:
I wonder if you know about Najinsky's underwear. You not know that this is one of the great scandals of dance history. The tradition was, at least in Russia and in quite a lot of countries, that the man dressed in, I think, what were called hoes, which are kind of short, later hosen type things over the groin, so that offending contours of the male anatomy. And now that probably got dropped in other countries during the 19th century. I haven't done proper research into this, but it certainly was dispensed with in quite a lot of ballets that the Diagleth Company presented in 1909 in the west. They did Giselle in 1910 with Nazinsky in wonderful new designs by Alexandra Benoit. Then after this, Nazinsky went back to Russia and danced his first Albare there in the presence of the Tsar's mother. And he wore his costume without these holes over the groin, as he had in Paris.
Alastair Macaulay [00:51:24]:
And we don't really quite know there were politics involved, but anyway, he was certainly told that he was offending the Darjee Empress. There's some evidence she wasn't remote shocked, actually, but there was always court scandal around and not just theatre scandal around. And then I think he went on again without the hose for Act Two, and shortly after that, he was sacked from the staff of the Imperial Theatre for offending the Daja Empress. Now, that may all have been machinated, because it was very useful to Diaglev. Diaglev up to that point, was only hiring dancers for a few weeks or months at a time when he took them to the west. Suddenly, with Najinsky at a loose end, he could sign Najinsky up full time around the year. And then other Russians, oh, well, if we've got Najinsky, we're in the money, we can go where he goes. And they all signed up, some of them full time.
Alastair Macaulay [00:52:26]:
And it was only great dancers like Kasavina who signed special contracts that I would spend some of my year in St Petersburg. But I come to the west to dance with Jaglete when I can. All to do, you see.
Speaker E [00:52:43]:
I'm sorry, I have to add one more question, just for all the willys out there for the Arab cops across the stage. What do we know about how high our back leg is? Is it the height of our head up nice and high, or is it kind of like ironing board flat originally? What do we think?
Alastair Macaulay [00:53:02]:
It's a very nice question and I'm not quite sure that they were there in 1841.
Speaker E [00:53:06]:
Thank you.
Alastair Macaulay [00:53:07]:
I rest my case, certainly. But they're part of the Russian text and the Russians probably didn't raise their legs high in the 19th century myself. Like a 19 degrees leg generally, as a rule.
Speaker E [00:53:20]:
Perfect. Yeah.
Alastair Macaulay [00:53:22]:
The question to me isn't the how high the back leg goes, because usually it is around 90 degrees and lots of companies still do it at 90 degrees. The question really is the upper body. Are we seeing wheelies who do it in first arabesque, looking ahead with their arms extended and looking above the arm as they hop forwards into space? I used to with the heads more down and they are hopping, looking somewhat forward, but diagonally. The emphasis is that they are dancing on the graves, that they are downward, and it has a whole different emphasis. Now, Ratmansky disagrees with me, I think. Doug and Marion may agree with me, but don't quote me. I was talking about Giselle all places in Phoenix, Arizona, this January with EB Anderson, and I just saw them do they showed some of the wheelies there and I said, oh, this is a company that still has the downward head and the hops. I think that's how it should be.
Alastair Macaulay [00:54:15]:
But almost no company other than Arizona that I know of dances it that way. I can tell you, 40 years ago, both the Royal and Abt danced it with the heads down.
Speaker E [00:54:25]:
Now the Fashion City Ballet did it with the heads down in a high high, I was going to say. Yeah, I remember the paint. Oh, and very slow, too.
Alastair Macaulay [00:54:38]:
And I would love to consult Doug about how he sees the speed. And Ratmansky, both those men really looked into the scores in detail.
Speaker E [00:54:46]:
That would be interesting to know, too, because I think it can be two completely different things just from the music, too. Right. The speed in that moment.
Alastair Macaulay [00:54:53]:
And I think also, whether you jump the hops, go onto the beat or after the beat, that creates a different drama.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:55:00]:
Sure, yeah, of course. Maybe just for our last question, we could kind of identify why we think Giselle has been such a long lasting hit and how it still resonates with audiences of today.
Alastair Macaulay [00:55:14]:
Well, of the period ballets of the 19th century ballets. It really has the most wonderfully coherent plot. And you have Act One alone consume a complete ballet, just because any ballet that ends and then death, you know, your heart is in your mouth and Giselle in the moment. And that is so touching. I hope you've seen Giselle's performances when you're like that. I certainly have. And then, of course, the strange, ambiguous language of the Willys, these dance creatures from the grave who dance men to death. It's both beautiful and sinister.
Alastair Macaulay [00:55:52]:
And that takes dance itself into a whole new dimension in Act Two. So it's a wonderful double pronged story. You think Act One is enough, but no, it's not remotely. And this Heathcliffe idea of love beyond the grave is so beautifully expressed. The twist that a Albrecht probably really wants to die. I think that's definitely what Gotier intended. He wants to die, he wants to join her in death, and then that she is a Willie and she partly wants to lure him towards his death, though the good side of her keeps surfacing and she does want to save him. It's a suspense ballet, right? Throughout act one and two, you're sitting there thinking, what's going to happen next? Oh, my God.
Alastair Macaulay [00:56:46]:
Is that happening? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Twist. Twist. You don't really watch Swan Lake. Sleeping Beauty. Nutcracker. Ever quite like that?
Speaker E [00:56:54]:
Right, yeah. Well, thank you, Alistair, so much for your time. As always, be brainstorming about the next ballet we can talk about, because our listeners just love hearing these deep dives. So thank you so much.
Alastair Macaulay [00:57:06]:
It was a pleasure. Thanks so much.
Speaker E [00:57:08]:
Thank you.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:57:08]:
Thank you. Alastair.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:57:15]:
Conversations on Dance is part of the Acas creator network. For more information, visit conversations on dancepod pod.com.