Dance
Giselle (Covent Garden)
Classic inhibitions
Deirdre McMahon
Giselle was 150 years old last June. Its performance history in many ways reflects the history of ballet itself. Giselle was the high point of the French Romantic ballet, but it disappeared from the Paris Opera repertory at the end of the 1860s. It sur- vived in Russia where it underwent several major revisions from Marius Petipa. It was not seen in Paris again until Diaghilev brought it back in 1911. The Parisian audi- ences, dazzled by the more exotic creations of the Ballets Russes, thought it charming but old-fashioned. But by the 1920s it had established itself in the repertory.
Giselle is a totemic role in the ballerina repertory, equivalent to Juliet or Ophelia in the theatre, but as with those roles the weight of history and tradition can be over- whelming. Ballerinas tend to approach the ballet in a stifling atmosphere of piety and incense. The result can be performances that go by the book, devoid of spontaneity and individuality. The problem of tradition is particularly evident in the Royal Ballet. The first great English Giselle was Alicia Markova in the 1930s and she had watched the great stars of the Ballets Russes. Fonteyn, when she came to dance the role in the late 1930s, said that at first she tried to reconstruct everything Markova had done. 'I felt greatly the lack of models that I could study and learn from,' she later
wrote, but she learned a great deal first from Frederick Ashton, who gave her his memories of Pavlova and Karsavina, and then from Rudolf Nureyev.
After Fonteyn one of the Royal's great- est interpreters was Lynn Seymour. Sey- mour's Giselle was dance-mad and she had a wonderfully neurotic edge, but this was an interpretation which did not go down well with the company and she hardly danced it with them after the 1960s. Sey- mour's experience illustrates the dangers.of a fossilised approach to the classics. Whom had Seymour's successors to watch for inspiration?
Unfortunately there isn't much inspira- tion in Peter Wright's production. His heavy hand lies over so much of the Royal's classic repertory these days — notably Swan Lake and The Nutcracker — but Giselle is fairly producer-proof. It has a cast-iron structure which resists meddling to any great extent. Act II remains one of the greatest examples of dance architecture ever created. Petipa gives us a chilling por- trait of the Wilis, the ghosts of girls disap- pointed in love. They are a destructive sisterhood, yet unlike so many other por- traits of female destructiveness the energy is not diffuse, the Romantic hysteria is gone. The dances which open Act II are pitiless and inexorable, with an almost mili- tary precision. It is one of the most potent images of frustrated women that I know.
Viviana Durante has just made her debut in Giselle. With her dark, Italian beauty she is the perfect embodiment of the Romantic ballerina, but the physical fragility is decep- tive because her technique, as the demands of Act II showed, has a steely strength. It was a wonderful debut. The question to be asked now about Durante is how she will develop. She is rising to each new chal- lenge and is plainly enjoying the experi- ence, but the real test of her artistry will come later. She was helped enormously by Irek Mukhamedov, who was making his company debut in the ballet. Giselle has been lovingly preserved by his old company the Bolshoi, and Mukhamedov is in the best tradition of Bolshoi Albrechts — ten- der, responsive, solicitous.
One of the most interesting reworkings of Giselle in recent years was that of Dance Theatre of Harlem, whose production moved the setting to a Louisiana pranta-
tion. Virginia Johnson, a Harlem ballerina who has made guest appearances with the Royal over the past year, does not look out of place in the more traditional version with her gentle, understated style. She was partnered by Zoltan Solymosi, the tall new Hungarian dancer. It wasn't a heaven-sent partnership and the chemistry evident between Durante and Mukhamedov was absent. However, it was good to see the minor roles being so satisfactorily per- formed. I particularly enjoyed Genesia Rosato's Bathilde, a role that is often a cipher. Rosato played her like a Joan Collins rich bitch.
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