Advice for Giselle

[Treefrog]

This is too good to stay buried in Links. Find out what advice columnist Ask Amy tells Giselle.

(Amy is the Chicago Tribune's replacement for Dear Abby, and a very fine one she is! I lover her column, which is very solid, practical, and up-to-date.)

Dear Amy: I'm an Austrian peasant girl who likes to dance. I recently met this terrific "peasant" guy named Albrecht. We really hit it off, but it turns out he's really a count who's engaged to a duke's daughter. . .

Dear Giselle: What is it with all of you tragic heroines? Not a week goes by that I don't hear from one or another of your ballet-worthy girlfriends.

I'm going to tell you what I told Juliet Capulet and Odette when they approached me with their baroque and tragic troubles: Simplify.

[Marga]

Absolutely marvelous!

Thanks for bringing this column to light. It sounds sort of like my own attempts when I try explaining Giselle to the ballet-uninitiated. Let's hope this "promo" brings in more people to watch the ballet. :yes: :blush:

[bart]

Really clever! Thanks, Treefrog.

[Jack Reed]

I enjoyed the joke. Thanks, Treefrog! But I have a sinking feeling. We're experienced, in the know, right? We get the humor. Would we have as big an experience, would anyone, if Giselle et al, "simplified"? Do we go to Giselle for the story, or for the dancing?

I can choke up at the end of Act I of Giselle, depending how repentent or converted the cad Albrecht is portrayed, but there's lots and lots of dancing in Giselle, and getting people in by telling them the melodrama seems to me like false pretenses: They can feel betrayed, because there's so much else. Would I inveigle a murder-mystery fan to go to an operatic tragedy for the plot, and have them run out because all those people do is stand around and sing? (Better the fan should see film noir.)

Maybe I take all this too seriously, but on other threads we've been discussing that there's not enough money for an orchestra and that maybe ballet can be sold to men as athletics. Won't most of us agree that if a dancer looks athletic, they're not quite up to what they're doing? So an approach that promotes ballet as something other than what it is seems to me somewhere between manipulative (and unworthy) and doomed to failure. That's where my sinking feeling comes from.

[carbro]

I'm not so sure I agree, Jack. In the late '80s I took my brother to NYCB. The first ballet was The Four Temperaments. Well into the Sanguinic Variation, his discouraged whisper: "I don't understand the story." I don't think he's seen any ballet since.

I think to many (although by no means all) novices, the story can be the hook that makes it accessible. If Amy's very contemporary, very witty summary of Giselle's heartbreak converts one or two new balletos, it's worth it. In time, they'll be able to take in more than just the story and the more obvious virtuosity. In any event, no harm done, right?

By the way, in writing to Amy, Giselle neglects to mention Hilarion. I was under the impression that before Albrecht came to town, G & H were something of an item. Or was that only in H's head?

[bart]

Giselle is one of those full-length ballets in which the dancing is profound and the story actually quite integral to appreciating it. I wish there were a way to help the audience to understand what is going on in Act II: especially the nature of, and reason for, Myrtha's sentence on both Hillarion and Albrecht. Once you know what is going on, the dancing becomes truly thrilling (a kind of dance of death), much more than the sum of the bravura steps.

How do you help the average audience member to see this? People don't seem to read the program notes, as far as I can tell. Nor do most of them arrive early enough for a curtain-raiser talk. I really wonder what most people make of it, without understanding the mime or knowing the "plot." That it's some extented divertisement? the funeral equivalent of the wedding act at the end of Sleeping Beauty?

P.S.: I wonder what kind of advice GQ, Esquire, Men's Health or other "men's" maggazine advice columnist might give to the Albrechts of the world.

[Marga]

A curious thing happened just a few hours ago at the "Stars of the 21st Century" ballet gala in Toronto.

Daria Pavlenko (Kirov) and Ivan Putrov (Royal Ballet) were performing the Act II pas de deux from Giselle. There was a group in the full-house audience that didn't seem to understand what was going on as they began to clap in unison (as is done with fouettés) during the passé relevés in Giselle's variation.

They stopped soon after noticing that no one else joined them. I don't know if they were enthusiastic teenage dance students or not, but it was a bit jarring, as I was so caught up in the moment. Pavlenko's interpretation of Giselle as a Wili was superb.