Giselle

Several friends and I went to see the ballet Giselle last night to celebrate my twenty-fourth birthday. Giselle is the "quintessential romantic ballet." It tells the story of a young nobleman in disguise and the naive village girl who falls in love with him. She abandons her betrothed for love of him and then dies of grief when she discovers his identity and meets his fiance. In the second act, she finds herself a member of the beautiful and terrible wilis, ghosts of women abandoned on their wedding day who dance unsuspecting men to death. Even in death, she saves her lover from dying at their hands by prolonging his execution until the sun rises and the wilis disappear.

My friend Tom and I had a rare disagreement about the ballet. He was critical of the young man, just another incarnation of the nobility-loves-then-abandons-peasant motif. Her furtive defense of him is supposed to pique the audience's anger for him and sympathy for her. But I don't think Tom's got this one right.

The choreography of Giselle is singularly playful in a way I've never seen. The first act, the chronicle of the couple as they fall in love, lacks the sultry pas de deux of other ballets. Ballet has ample physical means to portray the attraction of a lusty nobleman to a virginal peasant. Giselle exploits none of it. Instead, their courtship looks like what it is: a perfect visual demonstration of what it is to fall in love.

Her pursues her, she resists. He pursues her with greater zeal, she yields. She turns her happy solo, peasant dance into an integrated pas de deux with him. He seems truly caught up in her, and in her world. When the noblemen discover him, he fiercely resists reclaiming his place among them.

And then there's the way the nobleman responds to Giselle's death. It is far more than Tom's proposed "guilt, but not penance" for what has happened. His pitiful and poignant response to Giselle's body is moving and sincere. Later, it is only because he seeks to keep vigil over her body that he is put at risk by the wilis at all. At the end of the ballet, the nobleman and Giselle's final separation is gut-wrenching as the very-real specter loses form and disappears.

To me, at least, the love between the pair seems very real. The playfulness of their courtship captures exactly the way I feel about Adam. At our best, we are capable of all the gay joility of the dancing pair. Being with him is just that much fun. And the intensity of the longing between them, knowing they will never be together, evokes the way I feel every time I'm separated from Adam--irrepresible longing.

Most importantly, the emotion in the ballet isn't one-sided the way it so often is. In the choreography, Giselle loves and is loved in return. That's the most shocking, and important, thing I always have to remember about the love between Adam and me: he loves me, too.



This clip, from the second act, captures the couple in both their plaintive and playful moods.

Incidentally, you can see what would have happened to Giselle's lover/my favorite moment of the ballet here.