Review: ‘Giselle’ Bounds With Experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/arts/dance/review-giselle-bounds-with-experience.html

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Where does a ballerina go when she quits ballerinadom? When Julie Kent retired from American Ballet Theater in 2015, after 29 years, she had become a company figurehead: a beloved emblem of stylishness and sensitivity onstage across a wide repertory, charmingly natural in nondancing appearances. What happens to all that experience?

The Washington Ballet got lucky. When its artistic directorship became vacant in 2016, Ms. Kent was soon appointed to the job. Her husband, Victor Barbee, whose career at Ballet Theater was longer — 40 years — and scarcely less eminent, became the associate artistic director.

The 2016-17 season is their first at the helm. Whereas Ms. Kent’s predecessor, Septime Webre, led the repertory with his idiosyncratically dramatic choreography, her more traditional and international approach is akin to that of Ballet Theater’s. Ballets she danced by Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor join the repertory this spring; so does Alexei Ratmansky’s “Seven Sonatas” (2009), in which she created a role.

Thursday brought the opening night of the company’s production of the Romantic classic “Giselle.” The picturesque, attractive scenery (Simon Pastukh) and costumes (Galina Solovyeva) are as before; what’s new is Ms. Kent’s understanding. (She danced the title role many times.) In a brief curtain speech, she spoke of the experience that she and Mr. Barbee brought to this ballet. The cynic in me, however, was wary; I’ve known people with longer experience of 19th-century ballets to make unstylish and insensitive revisions.

That cynicism was unnecessary. Anyone directing the two-act “Giselle” has several hundred small options. There are matters of cuts, dramatic sequencing and musical text. (Adolphe Adam’s 1841 score has had many later additions and rearrangements.) Meanwhile, larger issues loom — about period (Just when in European history is “Giselle” set?), designs (How much realism, how much fantasy?) and overall style (How much should the ballet’s Romanticism be shaped by late-19th-century classicism?). A vast majority of Ms. Kent’s decisions were canny, and so seemingly definitive that you have to be a “Giselle” connoisseur to realize that any choices were involved.

Ms. Kent also welcomed back the Washington Ballet Orchestra, which, for financial reasons, has sometimes been replaced by taped music in recent years. Lars Payne’s attractive edition of Adam’s music has been subtly adapted by the experienced Charles Barker (principal conductor at Ballet Theater). Ms. Kent’s staging draws intelligently from tradition. Orthodox ballet mime is used: Although Giselle’s mother, Berthe (Elaine Kudo, the company ballet master), does not gesticulate the full story of the wilis, her sustained narration is authoritative and lucid.

I question just a few points. When the aristocratic hunting party arrives in Act I, most of its members discreetly take up neat positions behind Giselle’s village friends. This makes a nonsense of the class situation that this ballet depicts. (To win the love of the peasant Giselle, Count Albrecht has disguised himself as a villager. His blue-blooded fiancée, Bathilde, treats Giselle with kind condescension. When the scandal of his behavior suddenly emerges, it makes a lot less impact if the classy hunters have been standing politely behind Giselle’s rural friends.) And why is emphasis paid to the spectral wilis and their queen, Myrta, removing their veils when Giselle, the wili novice, then enters with no veil?

Thursday’s performance was efficient, often impressive as dance, seldom moving as drama. (This is often the case with first nights of big classics. Things relax in later performances.) The corps de ballet moved not just in unison but with a shared sense of line, gesture and dramatic engagement. Giselle was Maki Onuki, who has danced the role in the company’s previous staging; Albrecht was Rolando Sarabia, one of the dancers Ms. Kent immediately imported into its ranks.

Everything went smoothly (well, almost everything — Mr. Sarabia and a corps dancer deftly dealt with a flower that attached itself to Ms. Onuki’s dress in Act II), but without any of the dramatic chemistry that turns a strong “Giselle” into a touching one. The best moments came in their solos. In the quick jumps of Act II, Ms. Onuki’s rapid takeoff into the air, remarkable by any standard, won waves of applause. As Myrta, Kateryna Derechyna was another prodigious jumper and forceful presence. (A pity that her point shoes have loud, clippety-clop blocks.)

This was not the week’s only cast. But the real test comes when the production returns — soon, it’s to be hoped. “Giselle,” like any ballet classic, is not just a piece for single performances; it’s an investment and a graduation process, in which younger dancers will learn style and ascend through the ranks to leading roles. (Jonathan Jordan, who danced powerfully in Thursday’s Act I peasant pas de deux, was scheduled to dance Albrecht twice over the weekend.) The nuts and bolts are already invisibly in place. This “Giselle” should soon generate more emotion than it does now.