Giselle -- San Francisco Ballet Performance, Review
Giselle
San
Francisco Ballet Performance
January
27, 2014
This is a very strange story that ultimately doesn't make
sense. Maybe I just don't understand
it. A prince disguises himself as a
peasant and moves to a village to court a peasant girl of irresistible
charm. It would be like Jamie Dimon
disguising himself as a bus boy to court a waitress in a restaurant. A rather odd concept, don't you think? Especially since the prince is already
engaged to another woman -- but we don't find that out until later.
It is a narrative, and I do like ballets that attempt to
create a narrative line simply through dance without verbal support. But the narrative here is convoluted and
rather bizarre. Without first reading
the synopsis in the program, a viewer would be lost trying to figure out what
is going on.
The first act, after doing a passable job of establishing
the story gives way to a long cadenza-like display of dancing virtuosity. I had trouble grasping what all this
athleticism had to do with the story.
There is nothing wrong with virtuosic dance. This is, after all, the San Francisco
Ballet. But virtuosity for its own sake,
is self indulgent and risks becoming dull if it is overworked. I think this ballet, since it had so little
substance in the story line, relied a little too much on dazzle.
I don't like scenes where one or a small group of dancers
perform while a multitude of bystanders sits idle on the stage just
watching. This technique is employed to
excess in this ballet. My feeling is
that if someone is on the stage they should be doing something besides being
part of the scenery. I don't like
spearholders. If they are doing nothing,
then they should be doing nothing for a good reason. Inertness should speak. But in this ballet it doesn't, and you've got
these vast stationary multitudes on stage serving as an adjunct to the audience
of paid ticket holders while a few dancers hold court.
The prince's rival is Hilarion, a "woodsman," or
hunter from the village. He is a known
quantity to Giselle and she finds him much less appealing than the disguised
prince. Hilarion exposes the prince's
disguise, reveals his true identity, and the fact that he is already engaged to
Bathilde, a woman of his own class. This
puts the kibosh on Giselle, and instead of taking it in stride and chalking it
up to experience (or taking up with Hilarion), she runs herself through with
the prince's sword and dies. You can
always tell a vacuous story by the need for phony melodrama to pump some life
into it -- in this case, killing off the heroine at the end of the first act.
The music is undistinguished and tends toward the banal and
the schmaltzy. Visually, however, it is very beautiful. The sets, costumes, configurations and
choreography are interesting and make a pleasing impression. The dancers are outstanding, as usual. The San Francisco Ballet has done a superb
job with mediocre material. Apparently
it is enough to seduce the audience. The
house was full and seemed to give a good response to this vapid nonsense.
The second act was way too long. It could have been cut in half to a much more
pleasing effect. It takes place at
midnight in a forest where Giselle's grave is located. Giselle returns as a ghost accompanied by a
cohort of Wilis, forest spirits all decked out in pure white wedding dresses, to
comport with the prince who has come to visit her grave -- in the middle of the
night. The tenor of the whole second act
seems to imply no hard feelings on the part of Giselle toward the prince, even
though she was upset with him enough to kill herself with his sword at the end
of the first act. Now that she is dead,
all is forgiven and they dance like they are freshly love struck. It's idiotic and extremely repetitious. I was getting so tired of it, just waiting
for it to end, and it went on and on. The
curtain call seemed overdone as well, but then, I didn't feel much like
applauding and wanted to get out of there.
The moral of the story seems to be: you should not look for
love outside your own social class, and if you are a woman, you are bound to
get the worst of any such liaison -- a reassuring, conservative, message for
all the stodgy Republicans in the San Francisco audience.