Giselle
May 10-20, 2007
Music: Adolphe
Adam
Production and Staging: Maina Gielgud
Choreography: After Jean Coralli, Jules Perrot and Marius
Petipa
Sets and Costumes: Peter Farmer
Lighting: Randall Chiarelli
Performance Dates, Times and
Casting
(Casting refers to principal roles of
Albrecht and Giselle)
Thurs May 10- 7pm -
Larissa Ponomarenko, Roman Rykine
Fri May 11 - 8pm - Lorna Feijoo, Yury
Yanowsky
Sat May 12 - 2pm - Erica Cornejo, Nelson
Madrigal
Sat May 12 - 8pm - Larissa Ponomarenko,
Roman Rykine
Sun May 13 - 2pm - Karine Seneca,
Carlos Molina
Thurs May 17 - 7pm - Karine Seneca, Carlos Molina
Fri May 18 - 8pm - Lorna Feijoo, Yury Yanowsky
Sat May 19 - 2pm - Larissa Ponomarenko, Roman
Rykine
Sat May 19 - 8pm - Erica Cornejo, Nelson Madrigal
Sun May 20 - 2pm - Lorna Feijoo, Yury
Yanowsky
Gielgud's
choreography captures the heart of Giselle
May 11, 2007 The Boston Globe
Maina Gielgud's production of "Giselle," elegantly performed by
Boston Ballet, pares the mid-19th-century classic to its
essence.
When Boston Ballet
danced Maina Gielgud's production of Giselle in 2002, the
critics responded with rapturous reviews that have rarely been
equaled in the history of the Company. "Gielgud's staging of the
mid-19th-century classic is both traditional and profound,"
Christine Temin wrote in The Boston Globe. "Maina Gielgud's
intelligent staging of this beloved classic is elegant, cohesive,
and full of passion. Her interpretation isn't a self-indulgent,
revisionist one, but rather a carefully considered recognition of
the story's fundamental truths," Theodore Bale wrote in the Boston
Herald. The production's "success is due to [Gielgud's] reference
back to the melodramatic style so beloved by 19th-century audiences
who saw the ballet first at its Paris premiere in 1841," Iris
Fanger wrote in the Patriot Ledger.
Giselle is the
crowning achievement of the Romantic era of ballet, the most poetic
of all nineteenth-century full-length works. Giselle was
inspired by two works of literature, Victor Hugo's
Fantomes, and, especially, Heinrich Heine's De
l'Allemagne, which tells the tale of young women who died
before their wedding day, but whose love of dancing keeps them from
eternal rest. The ballet is about a peasant girl with a weak heart
and a passion for dancing, who becomes engaged to a man she
believes to be a peasant, only to discover that he is, in fact,
Duke Albrecht, and engaged to another. Giselle goes mad and dies of
a broken heart. In the second act the scene shifts to a forest
haunted by Wilis, the spirits of young women who died before their
wedding day and spend eternity dancing from midnight to dawn,
killing any man who happens to wander their way. Myrtha, the Queen
of the Wilis, summons Giselle from her grave in order to initiate
her into the community. A despondent Albrecht comes to pay his
respects at Giselle's grave, but with Giselle's intervention, his
life is saved and Giselle rests in peace.
Giselle,
choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, received its
triumphant world premiere in Paris on June 28, 1841, with Carlotta
Grisi in the title role and Lucien Petipa (brother of Marius) as
Albrecht, and soon became an international hit. The ballet
underwent an especially dramatic transformation when Marius Petipa
staged the ballet in Russia twice in the 1880s and once more in
1899, rethinking virtually every aspect of the production. It
is Petipa's Giselle that has served as a model for most
twentieth-century productions.