Friday, January 12

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A review of the English National Ballet in 'Giselle' by Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian.

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Katja Khaniukova is the opening night’s Giselle, dancing with delicate soft landings – Giselle is a girl who never shouts – and a warm glow, like the autumnal leaves framing the stage’s Rhineland setting. A playful, dreamy relationship develops between Giselle and Albrecht (Aitor Arrieta), a nobleman pretending to be a peasant, who will ultimately betray her. Arrieta dances handsomely, he’s not an all-out cad, just someone used to a charmed life. You believe his feelings for Giselle and there’s room for the idea that here’s a man wishing to escape the shackles of duty and live freely, before real life catches up with him.

 

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Yuan Yuan Tan announces her retirement from San Francisco Ballet.

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She was a special muse to resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov, who made an unforgettable role for her in his early career hit “Magrittomania.” In 2020, during the pandemic, Possokhov also choreographed and filmed a ballet featuring Tan and her mother, who encouraged Tan to accept a position in San Francisco when Tan was only 18 and knew almost no English.

 

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Fact-checking with Joan Acocella by Neima Jahroni in The New Yorker.

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Over the phone was not always Joan’s favorite way to make changes. She was also, as all of her colleagues knew, a virtuoso of the fax machine. Technology progressed; Joan stayed true to faxing. Sometimes she would open an e-mail, begin a response in type, print the e-mail, take out a pen, complete the response in longhand under the printed e-mail, and then fax the whole thing back to you. It was as if the only way she could finish a thought was to hold it in her hands before she put it into the mouth of the machine and let the wires deliver it. On her typed drafts, she’d often scrawl her revisions in the margins in a script that few besides her editor, having attained the intimacy of a twin or a mother, could decipher.

 

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The Ballet Support Foundation holds its inaugural gala performance and party.

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In just three years, she [Lola Koch] has elevated the Palm Beach Ballet into a Kravitz Center headliner. “But,” she told me, “I take tremendous pride that I was the first person to raise money for dancers who can no longer perform, with the Career Transition For Dancers program. For 36 years, I chaired its Heart and Soul Gala, raising money for dancers sidelined by injury. That happens often. Most dancers’ careers end by the time they’re 27. Fortunately, because of their discipline, they can be retrained. Career Transition dancers have become doctors, lawyers, dentists and entrepreneurs.”

 

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More reviews of the ENB in "Giselle."

The Daily Telegraph

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Created by the noted dancer-turned-dance-historian Mary Skeaping for the Royal Swedish Ballet in 1953, but first staged here in 1971 by London Festival Ballet (which became ENB), it was an attempt on her part to get pretty much as close to the original Paris staging as records and research would allow. And the result is an interpretation that, while shrewdly keeping some historical tweaks (Skeaping knew that complete authenticity, while beloved of ballet nerds, is no guarantee of enjoyability), basks in its unmodish old-fashionedness, and is particularly bewitching as a result.

The Times

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Leading English National Ballet’s opening night cast, Katja Khaniukova danced with a heavy heart and a light body. Her Giselle, demure and innocent, engaged in playful courtship with Aitor Arrieta’s boyishly handsome Albrecht before her joy was transformed into ethereal self-sacrifice.

Slipped Disc

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Most strikingly, Skeaping (I use the present tense, even though she died more than forty years ago) restores four passages of music in both acts that have usually been cut for more than a century. Of these, the two most remarkable are the extended pas de deux for Giselle and Albrecht in Act One and the fugue for the wilis in Act Two. The fugue comes as a musical shock amid a score otherwise characterised by lyrical flow; but that’s the point. It occurs at the ballet’s supreme dramatic impasse, when the dark power of the nocturnal wilis (who dance men to death in the forest) is blocked when Albrecht takes sanctuary at the cross on Giselle’s grave. (Alexei Ratmansky also restored this in his 2019 production for the Bolshoi in Moscow, as can be seen on YouTube.) “Giselle” scholarship has progressed considerably since this production was new; but even now it does much to add to our sense of this ballet’s subtleties. (No other production of my experience includes that Act One pas de deux.)

 

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And more:

The Evening Standard

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When the deception falls apart, Giselle, who previously sweetly hid her blushes in her hands, now hides her confusion. With everyone’s eyes pressing on her, she hurtles through the throng and dies of heartbreak. In the second act, remorseful Albrecht visits Giselle’s woodland grave, but finds the wilis – vengeful ghosts of jilted brides, in misty tulle and pallid wings. Led by Alison McWhinney’s severe Myrtha, ice in her every step, they threaten to dance him to death – only Giselle’s spirit can save him.

CultureWhisper

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For general audiences though, what appears on stage is a rather old-fashioned production with much to enjoy. Act I is depicted in muted tones drawn from nature: Giselle’s dwelling is a wooden cabin, the jolly peasants are dressed in simple costumes where tones of brown predominate.

The Stage

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And they are complemented delightfully by Ivana Bueno and Daniel McCormick in the peasant pas de deux, she chirpily upbeat, he radiating warm-heartedness. The glowering presence of Fabian Reimair’s Hilarion, Giselle’s thwarted suitor, is the worm in the apple. And Laura Hussey, excellent as Giselle’s mother, stamps grim authority on her mime scene, when she recounts the legend of the Wilis – the ghosts of brides who died before their wedding and seek vengeance on any man they encounter in the forest at night.