Let’s Explore the Ballet Giselle
I was listening to Metro Morning recently and they were interviewing Sonia Rodriguez from the National Ballet of Canada. She is one of the lead dancers in their latest production of Giselle which is a classic of romantic ballet repertoire.
It's also very popular with audiences so I thought folks might be interested in some background about it and other options if you can't make a local performance.
DVDs
"Acclaimed dancer-choreographer Akram Khan re-imagines the classic ballet for the 21st century. Giselle has become a former garment worker, while Albrecht is a member of the wealthy factory-owning class."
National Ballet of Canada's Giselle (2004)
"Giselle, a simple peasant girl driven to madness and death through an unhappy love, becomes a ghost ordered to destroy the man who betrayed her, yet seeks to sustain him because of her undying love."
"The quintessential romantic ballet, Giselle has remained a cornerstone of the classical repertory since its premiere in 1841. Peter Wright's landmark production for the Royal Ballet does full justice to the work's emotional and atmospheric power, with John Macfarlane's designs beautifully capturing the contrast between the human and supernatural worlds."
Music CDs
Giselle with Adan Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic
Also don't forget you can access all the recordings on Naxos Music Library (and Naxos Jazz) if you have a Toronto Public Library card.
Books:
Ballet: The Definitive Illustrated Story
"Discover more than 70 of the most famous ballet dances, from The Nutcracker and Swan Lake to The Rite of Spring. Learn the stories behind renowned companies such as The Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet. Explore the lives and achievements of dancers across the centuries, such as Margot Fonteyn, Carlos Acosta, and Darcey Bussell. Meet composers and choreographers, from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to Matthew Bourne."
Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet
"A distinguished dance critic offers an enchanting introduction to the art of ballet. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad-in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance."
"This engaging book is a welcome guide to the most successful and loved ballets seen on the stage today. Dance writer and critic Zoe Anderson focuses on 140 ballets, a core international repertory that encompasses works from the ethereal world of romantic ballet to the edgy, muscular works of modern choreographers. She provides a wealth of facts and insights, including information familiar only to dance world insiders."
Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
"Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed."
Symbolism in Nineteenth-century Ballet: Giselle, Coppélia, the Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake
"This book investigates allegorical meaning in the ballets Giselle, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, principally by examining their original librettos and costume designs, as well as considering their surviving choreographic legacy. Each ballet is examined scene by scene in order to identify occult symbols secreted within its structure."
Dance Classics: A Viewer's Guide to the Best-Loved Ballets and Modern Dances
The Creation of iGiselle: Classical Ballet Meets Contemporary Video Games
"The unusual marriage of Romantic ballet and artificial intelligence is an intriguing idea that led a team of interdisciplinary researchers to design iGiselle, a video game prototype. Scholars in the fields of literature, music, design, and computer science collaborated to modernize the 1841 ballet Giselle. Their goal was to revise the tragic narrative of the nineteenth-century culture of death, allowing players to empower the eponymous heroine for possible "feminine endings." The eight interrelated chapters chronicle the origin, development, and fruition of the project and exemplify collaboration. Dancers, gamers, and computer specialists will all find something original that will stimulate their respective interests."
Ballet & Modern Dance: A Concise History
"Ballet and Modern Dance meets the needs of both students and inquisitive dance goers through a narrative focused on the development of Western theatrical dance from the Renaissance to the first decades of the 21st century, incorporating the most recent scholarship and projecting trends."
2 thoughts on “Let’s Explore the Ballet Giselle”
Thanks Bill for a winter’s worth of dance material.
Hi,
So great to see a post about Ballet!
If I may point out an error in the title of the lithograph:
“Unknown ballerina as Giselle, Carlotta Grisi, 1841”
The Unknown relates to the artist who created the image, not to the identity of the dancer in the image. Carlotta Grisi is very much known as the ballerina in the painting pictured dancing the role of Giselle.
Thanks,
Leora