Ratmansky presents Giselle for the times
The United Ukrainian Ballet presents an emotional production at Segerstrom Hall
Premiering Alexei Ratmansky’s Giselle for the West Coast, the United Ukrainian Ballet is performing this weekend at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, CA. Truth be told, the dancers could have simply stood on the stage and received a standing ovation, but under Ratmansky’s brisk and nimble direction, the company of refugees pulled off a dramatic and technical tour-de-force that ended without a dry eye in the house.
Under the artistic leadership of Igone de Jongh, the United Ukrainian Ballet is a touring company of displaced Ukrainian dancers based in The Hague in the Netherlands. It presented the full-length Giselle based on the choreography of Marius Petipa after Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. The score by Adolphe Adam was played by the Pacific Symphony, conducted by Gavriel Heine.
Giselle, danced by Elizaveta Gogidze, is a life-loving peasant girl who becomes entranced with Albert, played by Oleksii Kniazkov, a nobleman disguised as a peasant. Unbeknownst to Giselle, Albert is betrothed to noblewoman Bathilde. Irresistibly drawn to each other, Giselle and Albert dance around each other through flirtatious encounters, despite her mother’s warning about her lurking sickness. Yet, Giselle is too much in love to heed. When a party of noblemen arrives in the village with Bathilde, the jealous gameskeeper reveals Albert’s true identity, and Giselle goes mad and dies of heartbreak.
The second act takes place in a forest haunted by the Willis, dead brides who have been wronged by their would-be-husbands. They are visited first by the grieving gameskeeper whom the vindictive spirits make dance to his death. The Willis then encircle Albert and threaten him with the same fate. Moved by eternal love, Giselle’s spirit emerges from the grave and saves Albert from their wrath. As dawn breaks, the Willis flee, leaving Giselle and Albert to bid farewell before she too must fade into the mist. In a twist to the more common ending, which is based on the 1841 original production, Giselle bids Albert marry Bathilde, who appears just as Giselle’s spirit sinks into the flowery knoll. Albert falls back toward Bathilde and her noblemen, reaching out toward his bride-to-be, in the hope of a new life with her.
In his pre-show introduction with de Jongh, Ratmansky explained that this ending symbolizes hope for new beginnings and a better life. No doubt the dancers, who have been in exile for so many months while their families remain back home in a war-torn country, hope for the same.
Ratmansky is a former Bolshoi Ballet director, whose family ties to Ukraine have made him especially outspoken about the war. By mining archival notes in the now-defunct Stepanov notation, Ratmansky is known for reconstructing the original choreography of beloved ballets. For Giselle, he breathed life into all-to familiar steps, marrying them with drama at every turn and adding whimsical touches. Musically crisp, he brought a new verve into the famous dance of the Willis. A specific moment in Giselle’s second act solo, her dance to save Albert, elicited more than one gasp from audience members. It happened when Gogidze extended her leg in develope a la seconde, her arms in second position - rather than the more typical fifth - palms turned upward toward the moonlit sky. Her leg then retracted dynamically to attitude derriere to promenade en dehors. Moments like these, in which Ratmansky’s dancers infuse familiar dances with sophisticated dynamics set this production apart. Costumes and sets by Hayden Griffin and Peter Farmer and lighting design by Andrew Willis enabled the mist-covered flying effects.
A much shorter contemporary dance followed Giselle. It opened with Oleksandr Teren, an ex-soldier who lost both legs to a shell on the frontline of the Ukrainian war. Sitting on the floor, his metal prosthetics on the floor before him, he sat in stone cold silence, affecting his arms into positions with a dancer-like grace. Evocative perhaps of loading a gun, digging a trench, praying before battle, it quickened in speed, repeating again and again before he collapsed on the ground. Emerging from the dark floor, the company dancers rose up, moving in fluid solidarity, their flowing limbs in tragic contrast. With resolve, however, Teren mounted his prosthetic, and stood up to join the company who lifted him above their heads in the off-white glow of the theater lights.
With that, the lights went dark and came back up for the company bow, Teren in the lead front and center. With the dancers draped in Ukrainian flags, Heine wove his baton and the orchestra played the Ukrainian National Anthem.
It’s rare today for ballet to carry political meaning that has such vivid stakes in the real world. The result here was a powerful night and a display of the grace and iron resolve of the Ukrainian desire for freedom. The production runs June 29 - July 2 at the Segerstrom Hall and ticket proceeds benefit BlueCheck Ukraine. To go seems like a fitting way to ring in the 4th of July celebrations.
I saw this very moving production, but this review is almost equally moving, capturing the ballet's complex emotional tenor of loss, longing, and hope through an exquisite technical vocabulary and a deep sense of Giselle's history as it relates to the present moment in time . I had not appreciated the nuances of Giselle's second-act dance to save Albrecht, or the ways that those nuances anticipate Ratmansky's radical, shattering postscript as both dancers--the mutilated soldier and the dead girl, reach from beyond death into life. I appreciate the refusal of sentimentality that RSM shares with Ratmansky. The dance says it all. So does the review.
Wow fantastic review! Sounds like a beautiful and tragic ballet that I would now like to see!Thanks for another great review Robert!