Theater pieces always manage a “…triumph…” or a “… wonderful…” printed on the program. Could mean anything – “With thousands of slaves in tow, Julius Caesar brought his triumph to Rome…”; “It is wonderful, the persistence of the Ancien Régime …”
But quote me whole when I say of François Gremaud‘s and Samantha van Wissen’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet that it gets inside the heads of today’s and yesterday’s creators and spectators. Doing that, it touches at the heart of the famous classic Giselle, ou les Wilis: I listened with real interest and laughed at, too, what was effectively serious textual analysis and I gasped in spontaneous dismay when van Wissen-Giselle dropped dead. And that is certainly proof of wonderful performing inside a triumph of theatrical writing.
Giselle… Comédie-Ballet has the same plot as all the Giselles I’ve ever heard of – Act 1: disguised noble falls for peasant girl who dies tragically after learning truth; Act 2: dead peasant girl thwarts her own damnation and the vengeance of supernatural females called Wilis. Also, Gremaud bases his Giselle…Comédie-Ballet on the script used for the Giselle, ou les Wilis première oof 28 June 1841 at the Paris Opéra by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier.
Photo © Dorothée Thébert FilligerGremaud has modeled his Giselle… script as a palimpsest: you have to pay attention to warp, weft and splotches of the paper, not just the most recent print on it. At reading, the script shapes an indivisible, if pretty giddy, whole of parts.
Choreographer-performer Samantha van Wissen’s execution of Giselle… Comédie-Ballet is more than equal to the task of holding together the whole of Gremaud’s palimpsest, which includes bits of general history, social context, authorial intentions, writing, choreography, stagecraft, along with the points of view of historic observers and actors. into Giselle… Comédie-Ballet.
Van Wissen uses a classic one-woman show format to turn the script into an amusing and instructive, even innovative, dance piece.
Moving with that subtle, distinctly personal, body confidence of an accomplished dancer, van Wissen begins Giselle… by owning Giselle, ou les Wilis, the classic format, and Giselle, a character. “Van Wissen”, she says, means “from Effacement” in Dutch, her native language. “Her” effacement alludes, she says, to one of the central issues raised by Giselle, ou les Wilis – which, one presumes, would include whether or not the effacement of Giselle is imposed or desired or self-imposed… Or just a literary intellectual’s will o’ the wisp.
Van Wissen goes on to demonstrate her ownership of the potential possible Giselles-Giselles through the piece, a significant pause here, a rising but always dulcet voice there for focus, but mainly letting spectators wander through, feeling they’ve decided questions and answers for themselves.
Van Wissen dances: moves as she talks, talks as she moves.
Sometimes arch, sometimes not, she comments on topics as diverse as the historic association of pantomime and ballet, on librettist Théophile Gautier’s belief in the centrality of love, on the role of Bathilde, Giselle’s mom, or on the previous wild and European success of Italian Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide at the Paris Opéra, which, coincidentally, wink, wink, is chock full of hot but tragic and invisible gals, desirable, morally weak yet sentimental and well-set-up guys, betrayal, witchcraft, vengeance. The whole shtick of course flies about the woods in twilight.
Photo © Dorothée Thébert FilligerVan Wissen demonstrates more than she says with hands and feet, pantomimes, mimes, dances, postures, figures, phrases… Baulked lover, what a disguised noble as 19th century ballet character looks like. Plays the leaping and twirling 15-year old Giselle, a dancing fool – do you know, she has a weak heart? It’s a big worry for Bathilde.
For the spectator, Van Wissen’s dancer art brings all the comment and movement to a boil: showing Giselle, ou les Wilis creates Giselle… Comédie-Ballet. That’s that’s why I gasped at the mime of Giselle’s death. That’s why I and my partner walked out thinking of Giselle… Comédie-Ballet – as dance more than performance.
So, Gremaud’s and van Wissen’s Giselle… is dance triumphant as well as well as literary or narrative art.
But I also think Giselle… Comédie-Ballet is pertinent to our times – by the thoroughness of its literary anatomy and in view of the needs of today’s spectators.
Remember van Wissen’s initial show-owning “effacement”?
When all is said and danced, does the ultimate esthetic success of scripted Giselle, ou les Wilis turn on rubbing out the girl and/or the thrill of femmes fatales, or, like contemporary entertainment, are the words and clichés just a pandering mishmash of what some producers and mountebanks think attracts eyeballs? Or is it a mix of its culture, commercial calculation and a desperate effort to talk about something universal and vitally important for human beings?
I come away from Gremaud and van Wissen’s Comédie-Ballet with the option of thinking it’s the mix. At its heart, I’m with them, because it’s clear that’s what they think, too, “Giselle”, as a concept, comes down to putting love, Love, capital L, on stage. In the end, it takes very little actual tweaking of Giselle, ou les Wilis to make that clear, too.
If the developer behind the Madame Butterfly I saw the other day had taken the care François Gremaud has taken with Giselle (…), I wouldn’t still be regretting the wasted 100 euros. I wouldn’t be wondering about the state of mind of the opera’s creative developer, either.
Photo © Dorothée Thébert FilligerHoly Cow! This Butterfly I saw was like stumbling into a screening of an irony-less Springtime for Hitler! Talk about bearing up under the White Man’s Burden. I can enjoy the pre-war works of novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline, a notorious racist and active anti-Semite. I can cite certain esthetic ideas of the social-climbing weasel Martin Heidegger, even knowing he was making love to Hannah Arendt even as he prepared to throw her, as well as his Jewish colleagues, under the Nazi bus. Still, there’s no way I can explain away that Madame Butterfly I saw that evening, in Germany, of all places.There’s just no rationalizing possible.
In the same vein, building on somebody’s graduate thesis about effaced “romantic heroines” and the long history of bootstrap-moralizing by rich American patrons and in the name of cleaning up historic misogyny, Akram Khan has recently managed to conjure Giselle, ou les Wilis as The Little Girl Who Could, switching the focus of the play from the sweet nebbish character of Giselle to the bracing message telling us that all a sillikins girl needs to do to undo eight thousand years of patriarchal oppression is show some dam’ gumption.
I know the proverb about beggars, wishes and horses, but all the same, I am thinking now that if Khan had seen Gremaud’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet, he might have considered using Gremaud’s approach to controversial classics to do Madame Butterfly instead. Butterfly fits Khan’s esthetic mood better. More important, if Giselle, ou les Wilis turns around Love, capital L, Butterfly surely turns around Power, capital P. Imperial and patriarchal Power, to boot. There’s certainly room for a little female pushback in the opéra’s narrative dynamics. Even a little American-style girl-gumption might actually do the trick!
Let’s hope somebody produces Gremaud’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet for international audiences – in English.
Beggars, mount up! Let’s especially hope that other aspiring classic controversy re-creators have a look at what Gremaud has achieved with his Giselle… Comédie-Ballet.
“Giselle… Comédie Ballet” by François Gremaud was produced at the Théâtre de la Bastille with solo dance and performance by Samantha van Wissen with musical accompaniment by Léa Al-Saghir or Anastasiia Lindeberg (violin), Tjasha Gafner or Antonella de Franco (harp), Héléna Macherel or Irène Poma (flute) and Sara Zazo Romero (saxophone). A printed libretto is available. I saw it on 6 January 2023.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
