{"id":1382,"date":"2016-11-15T17:29:54","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T17:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2016-11-15T17:38:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T17:38:00","slug":"propwatch-the-lace-in-giselle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2016\/11\/propwatch-the-lace-in-giselle.html","title":{"rendered":"Propwatch: the lace in Giselle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"enb_giselle_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s only a moment. Giselle, a migrant seamstress made rootless by a changing world, confronts the dauntingly affluent Bathilde. Their encounter ripples with instinctive distrust (unwittingly, each loves the same guy; this is ballet). Bathilde wears sumptuous black, plume-topped and lace-swathed. Giselle is in faded blue (washed out and washed again) \u2013 but she won\u2019t simper, won\u2019t sink in subservience. Instead, she reaches out and rubs the filigree lace work on Bathilde\u2019s dress.<\/p>\n

Giselle recognises this extraordinary work \u2013 because it\u2019s her own. She made this elaborate lace. Privilege depends on labour like hers, and she knows exactly what it\u2019s worth \u2013 and what she\u2019s worth too. It\u2019s just a moment \u2013 but a moment of electric disillusion that suggests how radically Akram Khan\u2019s new Giselle<\/em><\/a> for English National Ballet<\/a> departs from the 1841 original.<\/p>\n

A dress caress also figures in the Romantic scenario, but that Giselle is a sheltered country girl dazzled by an aristocratic hunting party. She naively touches Bathilde\u2019s dress because she\u2019s never seen anything so beautiful. Alina Cojocaru<\/a>\u2019s steely gamine, Khan\u2019s Giselle at the premiere this autumn, would find awe undignified \u2013 glamour casts no spell over her, because she knows precisely what it costs, and how cheap labour sustains it.<\/p>\n

Khan and his collaborators have thoroughly rethought Giselle.<\/em> It\u2019s still the story of a poor woman played false by a rich man; it still follows her death and fateful encounters in the afterlife. It still contrasts innocence and experience, love and expediency, the bed and the grave \u2013 but redraws the trajectory between those coordinates. Giselle isn\u2019t a peasant, but one of the migrant garment workers brought to a foreign factory then stranded when it closes (because: globalisation). Albrecht (Isaac Hern\u00e1ndez) fancies an escape from the elite and enjoys teasing duets with Giselle, but doesn\u2019t have the courage to make the break. In Tim Yip\u2019s design, the wall that divides rich and poor, living and dead, is no metaphor, but a vast, tilting structure that segregates by income (and, later, by pulse).<\/p>\n

Bathilde (Bego\u00f1a Cao) and her fellow landlords emerge from behind the wall, almost grotesque in cold silver light. Yip designs them outlandish silhouettes \u2013 women marooned by their pannier skirts and millinery, frockcoated dandies who eye up the migrant talent. The indigent workers don\u2019t dance for joy \u2013 they dance to please, to turn defiant dance into entertainment for the toffs.<\/p>\n

\"enb_giselle_2-emma-kauldhar\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Touch has a precise, searing value in this world. There are handprints in the wall \u2013 testament to anxious, insistent humanity \u2013 and Giselle presses her own hands into them, presses Albrecht\u2019s too. He doesn\u2019t know what that desperation feels like \u2013 and Hilarion (Cesar Corrales\u2019 snake-hipped broker between the worlds of need and privilege) catches him not feeling it. Touch might also mark the reality of Giselle and Albrecht\u2019s relationship: when she understands how his background pulls him back, Cojocaru puts her hand to his face \u2013 as if to prove she knows him, knows his warmth, through her flesh and down to the bone. We hear an awful crackle in the score, as if of a radio signal fading out of range.<\/p>\n

Touch says: we\u2019re here. Touch says: this is now. When it becomes clear that touch has lost its truth, that Albrecht is withdrawing, Giselle unravels, falling in a broken spiral. Everything disperses: the workers move on, pounding, slanting, making for more welcoming territory. Khan and co define a terrifyingly rootless world in which nothing is stable, in which touch is fleeting.<\/p>\n

Giselle dies and joins the shades of workers left behind in the ghost factory, its light chocked with dust. Like their classical ballet counterparts, they teeter on pointe \u2013 never to feel again the slap of sole on soil. Cojocaru registers her reluctance to learn the ways of this cold, stiff world \u2013 she lunges, thrashes, flings back her head. When Albrecht appears, she stares down the dead, restores a sense of terror to Giselle\u2019s unfinished business. The lovers touch \u2013 but do they feel each other\u2019s press on face and breast, or is it just a memory of weight and warmth? The dancers seem to drift through each other; arms fall away even as they reach out. We\u2019re a long way from Giselle feeling a dress and knowing its history and her own. Touch says: I know this world. Touch says: know me. When touch falls away, so does all comfort.<\/p>\n

Photos (top: Cojocaru and Cao; below: Cojocaru and Hern\u00e1ndez) (c) Emma Kauldhar<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s only a moment. Giselle, a migrant seamstress made rootless by a changing world, confronts the dauntingly affluent Bathilde. Their encounter ripples with instinctive distrust (unwittingly, each loves the same guy; this is ballet). Bathilde wears sumptuous black, plume-topped and lace-swathed. Giselle is in faded blue (washed out and washed again) \u2013 but she won\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,29,247,322,321],"class_list":{"0":"post-1382","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-ballet","9":"tag-dance","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-props","12":"tag-propwatch","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1389,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions\/1389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}