Early in their romance, the peasant maiden Giselle puts her pursuer’s intentions to an age-old test. She plucks a flower’s petals one by one, saying, “He loves me, he loves me not.”
Pulls between opposites are at the heart of Giselle, epitome of the romantic ballet genre, timeless because of the compelling simplicity of its story, with tension at play between desire and duty, impulse and restraint, mercy and vengeance.
Last Friday evening, Atlanta Ballet opened its first production of the classic since 2006 at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, a version with choreography based on Marius Petipa’s revision of Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot’s original 1841 production. Tara Simoncic conducted as the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra played Adolphe Adam’s score.
Since Gennadi Nedvigin became artistic director in 2016, he has reshaped the company under a more technically refined if emotionally distant style of classicism. With new company member Denys Nedak, several standout soloists and a highly unified corps de ballet, “Giselle” is likely Atlanta Ballet’s greatest artistic success since Nedvigin assumed direction.
The stage is set with contrasting worlds, vivified by Randall Chiarelli’s lighting and Peter Farmer’s scenic and costume designs. Golden thatch-roofed cottages backed by a swirling purple sky evoke the medieval peasant village where Albrecht appears, a nobleman disguised as a peasant. He is a young aristocrat, perhaps a Romantic who aspires to experience perfect beauty, if only for a fleeting moment, by wooing the innocent Giselle.
He later enters a moonlit forest glade where Wilis, spirits of jilted maidens who died before their wedding days, exact vengeance on men by dancing them to death.
Credit: Kim Kenney
Credit: Kim Kenney
Nedak, a distinguished former principal dancer of the National Opera House of Ukraine, joined Atlanta Ballet last fall, and his offstage circumstance intensified the drama Friday evening. Nedak’s family came from Ukraine in December and again last month to see him dance in the company’s production of “Firebird.” While war now rages in Ukraine, Nedak and his family are still here.
Nedak cuts a sleek profile, his classical technique ingrained as he carried himself Friday with unassuming natural grace. As Albrecht, Nedak deftly moved through soaring leaps and turns, his emotions at first contained, then freed as his character’s conflict increased.
As partner to Jessica Assef, who danced the title role last Friday, Nedak showed both power and refinement, with equal focus on the physics of partnering and the illusions the pair created. He lifted a white-clad Assef overhead as if she were a puff of mist. He supported her, seemingly hovering over him like an angel. When Nedak balanced her lengthened body horizontally across his heart, her form seemed to symbolize his guilt over her untimely death.
Assef interpreted Giselle’s mad scene with clearly etched accuracy, offering shades of the character’s fragility, heartbreak and despair. With her slip of a figure and lithe-limbed technique, she was an apt Wili. She dove into adagio lifts with exacting precision. Her stamina impressed, but she often looked at the floor or turned her face to the audience without projecting outward, a habit that distanced her from her audience. If Nedvigin’s style aims for self-submission toward creating a larger illusion, Assef’s Giselle meets the mark.
Mikaela Santos and Erik Kim exuded natural warmth in the Peasant Pas de Deux. Partnered by a buoyant Kim, Santos sped through sparkling footwork, perched graciously on pointe, then circled the stage with soft bravura and spirited joy.
As Myrtha, heartless Queen of the Wilis, Ashley Wegmann topped her compelling 2019 take on the vengeful witch in “La Sylphide.” Whether gliding across the floor on pointe or commanding Giselle to dance her lover to death, Wegmann captured her character’s otherworldly malevolence in a way that melded beautifully with story and choreography.
Credit: Kim Kenney
Credit: Kim Kenney
A uniform corps of Wilis may be one of Nedvigin’s standout achievements. The ensemble of 18 women in long white tulle skirts moved as one body, subject to their queen’s will. Often an abstraction of larger themes, they seemed to embody unseen forces, creating uncanny imagery.
The Wilis proceeded slowly across the floor in accumulating lines, like veils of moonlit mist rolling across a still lake surface. In perfect unison, they skimmed forward, reaching through arabesques, then stretching back, as if in a state of suspended unrest. At one point, nine evenly spaced pairs posed in arabesques facing opposite sides of the stage, their gossamer skirts unfurling like blossoming lilies.
“Giselle” is a good match for a company that now appears to emphasize form over feeling. A perfect classical arabesque, for example, has an abstract and absolute truth to it, and an allegiance to the art form’s highest technical standard is growing clearer with each succeeding Atlanta Ballet production.
In this classic, dualities shape the timeless story told through an ephemeral medium, with pulls between love and indifference, the formal and visceral, the elegant and tragic. At some evanescent point between these realms lies the poetry of “Giselle.”
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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