Akram Khan's Giselle
For his first full-length ballet, choreographer Akram Khan has found alchemy in his collaborators
Two figures turn, each embracing a ghost. In a poignant last duet near the end of Akram Khan’s Giselle, the lovers move in tandem, their arms cradling an empty space where the other should be.
It is one of many moments of great subtlety in Khan’s new version of the classic ballet, which transposes this 19th-century story of love, betrayal, life and death to a present-day factory where Giselle and her fellow undocumented workers, performed by English National Ballet, are manipulated by their rich landlords. When Albrecht, a member of the landlords' class in love with Giselle, is found out by his family and forced to return to his fiancée Bathilde, Giselle is driven mad with pain. Dying, she is cast into an eerie limbo and pulled towards death by the spectres of other women who’ve been broken by their labour.
Khan’s grounding in forms of dance that have myth and ancient storytelling at their core combines with this vision of spirits, in-betweens and netherworlds to moving effect. Motifs flit like phantoms from character to character – Albrecht is seen sadly echoing shapes used earlier, belligerently, by Giselle’s would-be lover Hilarion (the hugely charismatic Cesar Corrales, who feels slightly underused). Elements of classical ballet are given a haunted new language: in Act II, normally silent pointe work is fragmented into a chorus of percussive complaints, working in dialogue with composer Vincenzo Lamagna’s malaised score; and as Giselle dies, her sequences start to deform, dancer Alina Cojocaru’s legs folding beneath her in almost gruesome collapse.
Perhaps the longest-lasting image will be one of the company in Act I, their bodies lathed into darts, shooting across the stage like human shrapnel. The slate-grey and skin tones of their dress add to the impression of a factory-bound hurricane, all metal and flesh.
Deceptively simple, it is the work of visual designer Tim Yip – known to many for his art direction of Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – that elevates Giselle from the impressive to the powerful. His bizarre and distended costumes for the landlords – not unlike those worn in the Hunger Games’ privileged Capitol – externalise the absurdity of their wealth, while his set consists of an unassailable wall that functions as both monolith and metaphor, its physical implacability later revealed (like the social constructs it represents) as somewhat more illusory. At the end of Act I it spins in a potent evocation of the nausea of grief; and there is enough meaning in the production’s final image to leave you thoughtful for many hours afterwards.
Akram Khan's Giselle:
Manchester Palace Theatre, 27 Sep-1 Oct; Bristol Hippodrome, 18-22 Oct; Southampton Mayflower Theatre, 26-29 Oct; London Sadler's Wells, 15-19 Nov 2016