Erina Takahashi is bidding farewell as an ENB dancer in their delicate and poignant Giselle

United KingdomUnited Kingdom Mary Skeaping’s Giselle: Dancers of English National Ballet, English National Ballet Philharmonic / Gavin Sutherland(conductor), London Coliseum, 15.1.2025. (JO’D)

Erina Takahashi (Giselle) and Francesco Gabriele Frola (Albrecht) in Mary Skeaping’s Giselle © Photography by ASH

Creatives:
Production and Choreography – Mary Skeaping
Original Choreography – Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot (revised by Marius Petipa)
Music – Adolphe Adam, et.al.
Design – David Walker
Lighting – Charles Bristow (recreated by David Mohr)

Cast:
Giselle – Erina Takahashi
Albrecht – Francesco Gabriele Frola
Hilarion – Fabian Reimair
Berthe – Laura Hussey
Myrtha – Precious Adams
Zulma – Minju Kang
Moyna – Anna-Babette Winkler
First Soloists, Soloists, Artists of the Company of English National Ballet

As a dancer in Anna Pavlova’s production of Giselle in London in 1925, the programme notes tell us, Mary Skeaping first experienced what was to become a life-long love of this ‘essence’ of Romantic ballet. In 1971 she staged a production for London Festival Ballet (as English National Ballet was then called). A production that looked beyond Marius Petipa’s St. Petersburg revision of 1884, on which subsequent versions had been based, to Giselle as it was originally performed in Paris, with choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, in 1841.

Access to the original, unpublished score by Adolphe Adam helped in this undertaking. And it was the score in particular, as played by English National Ballet Philharmonic under the baton of Gavin Sutherland, that made this current Giselle on its opening night in London not something ‘grandiose and morbid’, as the American critic Edwin Denby once described the ballet, but something really delicate and poignant.

Poignancy was there already in the fact that Erina Takahashi was giving her penultimate performance in the UK as Lead Principal with English National Ballet. She has danced with the company for nearly thirty years, yet as the Giselle of Act I she embodied youthful simplicity and charm. If Francesco Gabriele Frola inhabited the role of her duplicitous lover, Albrecht, to a slightly lesser degree, his dancing, as the ballet progresses, made you ‘catch’ for its musicality and expression.

On discovering that Albrecht is not a fellow peasant, as she thought, but an already betrothed aristocrat, the frail Giselle (she has a weak heart that makes dancing itself a risk) goes mad and dies. Act II sees her return as one of the Wilis, the ghosts of brides who have died before their wedding day, and who wait in the forest at night to make any man they find dance himself to death. In this production there are several men, besides Albrecht and Hilarion (Fabian Reimair), the peasant rival for Giselle’s love, to be found in the forest. The story takes on a universal aspect.

Precious Adams as Myrtha in Mary Skeaping’s Giselle © Emily Nuttall

But is perhaps in its portrayal of the Wilis that Mary Skeaping’s Giselle most obviously evokes the ballet of 1841. In their costumes and their movements these Wilis resemble the sylphs of La Sylphide of 1837: a strange sisterhood who dance, first and foremost, for themselves. The dancers of English National Ballet, led by Minju Kang (Zulma) and Anna-Babette-Winkler (Moyna), capture the eerie otherworldliness of the Wilis. Their shunt hops in arabesque are all the more unsettling for being fifth arabesque in the position of head and arms: these Wilis look out at the audience as they hop.

As Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, Precious Adams provides the final, necessary support on which the ballet rests. It is no small pleasure to see her imposing interpretation. She summons Giselle from her forest grave to dance without fear of heart failure, now, but also without joy. Myrtha oversees the death of Hilarion, from exhaustion. She would condemn Albrecht to the same fate. He is saved by Giselle’s ability to forgive and to plead for his life. Giselle dances for him and with him, in sad, impossible duets, until a bell announces the coming of dawn and the Wilis return to their graves.

John O’Dwyer

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