Giselle

Struck in dim blue lighting, Giselle appears through the fog of Willis, downcast, veiled in white, like a ghost on her wedding day. The veil is swept from her face as she comes to life, the tutu unfurling like smoke, her head following her body around the room. Every movement of Giselle traces the pervasive feminine ideals of the romantic era, but also colors the inherent tension that resulted from creating the feminine ideal.  The romantic ballets like Giselle gave women one of the first opportunities in western history to have center stage.  Giselle is not an accessory, she is at the end of every gaze, within and without the stage.  However, at the end of the gaze is a female of fiction; almost too delicate, emotional, and vulnerable to be real.  

The dance is a display of power, the power it takes to create the romantic fantasy of ‘the woman.’  Anyone can slip into dreams of Giselle’s purity and grace, idealize her femininity as she breaks into penchees. Giselle frees women of the title ‘the lesser sex’ with an almost post-modern adoration for femininity.  Yet as she wilts and bows her head Giselle is bound to this femininity, not only by the steps but by the fiction they create.  She is the unattainable ideal, born of the era’s inability to grant women the power of reality. 

Giselle is exaggeratedly emotional, her character at first is unmistakably innocent, young, and playful.  She smiles at the Duke Albrecht with large clueless eyes, will look away as if unsure and take a few steps forward only to turn back and smile again as soon as he follows her.  As Albrecht’s real identity as a duke and not the peasant she believed him to be is revealed to her, her emotionality reveals itself to the audience.  It is as if her steps design the caricature of a woman, dangerously impassioned as she dies of a broken heart running through folds of onlookers.  The dance is an ode to her emotion, the tragedy of her womanhood idealized.

 Her character is in part a result of the expressiveness craved in the romantic era. Amidst the industrial revolution, the logic of the enlightenment left most in factories and smoke filled streets.  Pastoral scenery and myths of old became nostalgic fantasies, and sensational intelligence a wanted escape from the greying landscape.  The feminine identity of an emotional, objectified beauty was put on a pedestal of fairy tales.  This allowed women a new respected role beyond domestic labors, a role caged in choreography, as Giselle is caged within the surreality of her death.

Giselle is never more beautiful then when she reawakens from the dead. When she appears in the 2^nd act as a Willi there is a pas de deux between her and Albrecht, and she is forced to seduce him into dancing with her mournful adagio.  She pushes farther on to her point shoes, her extensions stretch her tutu into misty cobwebs.  An inadvertent temptress with genuine love, her movements begin to put the air around her to sleep.  Her arms melt gravity and her body becomes a tired eyelid.  Giselle’s promenade is so light atmosphere suddenly feels too heavy.  As I watch this adagio over and over again, she seems less real everytime, and a corset begins to wrap itself around my love for her.

The tension between the mystical and the real, the stage and the audience, is cradled in this scene, between life and death, fiction and familiarity. In it females can command the fate of men using feminine qualities, but in a world that couldn’t possibly exist. It is the most ethereal, transcendent and elegant world one can imagine. The very nature of the woods of Willis expresses at once a desire for femininity and the refusal to consider that desire an attainable possibility.

The most choreographically extreme expression of complete love in the entire ballet is told in the most mystical setting.  Thus this ballet does not simply tell of the tragedy of Giselle’s beauty, it tells the tragedy of human perception of beauty as conceived of in the romantic era.  Beauty was feminine, it defied logic and reality, it was longed for and yet too tragic for anything but a stage. 

             As the dance catches itself between escapism and forward momentum it marks a transitional period in the western perception of femininity.  Giselle reflects a time when woman could use the stage to begin to skirt the truth of the fictions that lie outside the curtains. Femininity, as surreal as it may have been, gave women a voice instead of silencing them.  In today’s world there is still a withdrawal from showing emotion and fragility, especially amongst more powerful women.  Contemporary imaginations can still learn from Giselle, in spite of its confined gender binaries.  Giselle is still compelling because the strength that comes from a choice, of any gender, to be vulnerable is still craved.