Skip to main contentSince the birth of story ballets there've been people who hate them. The idea of "dance to the death" is often someone's excruciating memory of enduring two hours of exaggerated gesture by men in tights. But to others, these same narrative classics impart a sense of joy, a remembrance of what we thought ballet was supposed to be--before we knew better.
Oregon Ballet Theatre brings back that Romantic Era staple, Giselle, for a third time (the company staged it twice in the 1990s) with a twist: Artistic director James Canfield is staging the classic himself this time. The choreography belongs to a pair of 19th-century gentlemen: the Paris Opera ballet master Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, who created the bulk of Giselle's solo work for the first Giselle, Carlotta Grisi, his wife. But the valuation placed on mining the emotional depth of the characters is all Canfield.
Giselle's plot, created by Theodore Gautier in 1848, epitomizes the Romantic movement: romance, self-destruction and a restless individual seeking an unattainable love. But using that era's mimed and stylized movement to tell a story can be more jarring to contemporary observers than bare bodies in electric seizures. Still, when performed correctly, story ballets rise above their mimelike nature to give us a window back in time as well as a way to link this past to the present.
Such links are best viewed in the corps, a group of dancers who establish the story's scenes in the vein of the traditional Greek chorus. "It's that element of exactness that allows the corps to become a character in itself," Canfield says. They set the overall emotional tone as one body.
The principals provide the nuance to these emotional states with stock devices. They blow air kisses, count daisies or stab fingers at one another to show anger. The touch of a hand to a soft cheek conveys the strength and reviving capability of love.
If one gets lost, listen to composer Adolphe Adam's score. His masterful use of the leitmotif (a musical device where a particular theme is used to identify a specific character) highlights personal passions with Klieg-light intensity.
On OBT's opening night, Vanessa Thiessen worked her subtle magic as Giselle much as she did in the 1999 production. Her partner, Chris DeMellier, played Albrecht as a golden retriever of a man-boy who it seems does not fully comprehend the serious effect of his attentions on Giselle. Katarina Svetlova tints her austere Myrthra, the Queen of the Wilis, with a welcome sense of regret.
The emotions of this romantic work are painted with a finer brush than OBT's The Nutcracker. For the most part, the principal characters' finely toned performances come across as peculiarly natural for pantomime.
But when DeMellier's exhausted body hits the stage with an audible smack near Act II's end, one wonders how far the courtly ballet of gestures has been transformed into a dramatic effort to approximate realism--with all its accompanying warts. Perhaps in this century, it's impossible to re-create Romantic simplicity, as our bodies only speak in modern, complex phrases. Fortunately, the effect of Gautier's timeless story itself has no known expiration date.
Oregon Ballet Theatre at the Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 222-5538. 7:30 pm Thursday- Saturday, March 13-15. $5- $82.
WWeek 2015