Giselle: Belle of the Ballet

An idyllic forest in a far-off land, a long time ago.

A trusting innocent,

seduced by an upper-class Lothario.

Betrayed and heartbroken, she goes mad, and dies.

And then, as a spirit, from beyond the grave,

she forgives him.

This could be a fairy tale, but it is the story of Giselle,

one of the most influential ballets we have.

It changed the face of dance, bringing it to life.

Giselle is a defining role, that in its 175 year history

has challenged every great ballerina.

This 19th-century drama continues to fascinate choreographers,

dancers and audiences.

I'm going to find out why.

I've grown up with Giselle.

As a child I saw it so many times,

and it always intrigued me.

And now, as a professional dancer,

I've played Giselle in over 100 performances,

and I always find something new in it.

Now, as artistic director at English National Ballet,

I have recently been involved in two productions that have given me

the chance to explore it afresh,

to find out why it's endured so long,

and what lies at its heart that is so timeless and contemporary.

The first is the original 1840s version that most ballet-goers

will be familiar with, peopled by peasants, aristocrats

and vengeful ghosts.

Giselle is performed by my colleague, Alina Cojocaru.

And I played Giselle in a gritty new take on the piece by Akram Khan,

one of our most exciting choreographers.

Great! OK, let's try it again.

These two very different takes on the same story give me a chance

to explore Giselle, get to its very essence,

and understand why this great ballet continues to move us so deeply.

I'm going to start by looking at the 19th-century Giselle,

and a heroine who turns out to be very much a child of her age

and the society that created her.

It was a time of revolution - industrial,

with its rapid growth in mechanisation

and its artistic response - Romanticism.

Romanticism - where imagination and the power of the natural world were all.

Painters such as Gericault and Delacroix,

composers like Berlioz and writers, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo,

all brought a new, turbulent energy to the arts.

Romanticism swept across Europe,

but it was in the heart of France that it flourished.

Paris - the capital of culture of Europe

for the first half of the 19th century.

Here was the greatest museum in the world, the Louvre.

Here, music and architecture thrived,

the fashion and perfume industries made their mark,

and Paris Opera drew composers and choreographers.

Paris was, quite simply, the envy of the world.

Giselle was to usher in a new age in dance.

It will fuse story and emotion,

music and movement, in a way no other ballet had done before.

And it set the mould for what ballet was to become.

By the end of the century, the Russians will have given us

its greatest classics, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.

The writer and critic Theophile Gautier

came up with the idea for Giselle.

He was a Romantic who craved an art form that was sensual,

opulent and alive.

Gautier had read a poem by Victor Hugo

about a young Spanish girl who danced herself to death.

This was one of the images that spurred him to create Giselle.

And the girl he came up with is a naive innocent with a fatal flaw -

she has a weak heart.

Giselle has purity, she just wants to feel everything.

She wants to feel love, she wants to dance.

She is full of joy and life,

probably because she knows her life is fragile,

and she may lose it at any time.

She takes it all in.

Giselle goes around, yes?

So for us as dancers, we have to take these elements

and portray Giselle as a convincing character.

Only then will she have life.

I feel strongly that with Giselle, it has such a long tradition,

the key to its success has to rely

in the artist that performs it today.

So I always try to find reasons to make Giselle believable.

My Giselle, the way I see it is, she does what her heart tells her to do.

She chooses to be happy.

She chooses throughout this drama to see the sun shining every day.

She chooses to be the light for everybody,

just because she has that in her heart.

So there must be something in her that separates her from all her friends.

So as I dance, I just run more, and stronger than everybody else,

even though my heart is not strong, so it's not good for me to do that.

Which then gives a certain drama in the moments where

she really feels unwell.

So it gives a little bit more depth to the sadness,

and then it makes the light and the joy a bit more powerful.

On the face of it, the innocent and fragile heroine now seems

a bit of a cliche.

But for the 19th-century audiences,

she will have embodied some of their deepest concerns.

I mean, this is a period when women, you know, are dying in childbirth,

they are victims of un-understood venereal diseases.

Consumption is a huge problem,

and the conditions of life are extremely harsh for children,

girl children and for women.

You really are, in a way, seeing through a lens,

so there's an element in which the light, fragile girl magnifies

in a sort of oddly idealising way, a kind of actual...

..kind of reality.

In the early 19th century, Paris was a city in crisis.

The Industrial Revolution was in full swing.

The newly-built railways brought waves of immigrants into the cities

in search of work.

Poverty was rife.

For the have-nots,

this rapid growth only meant squalor of the worst kind.

People survived in stinking, overcrowded filth.

Crime and cholera were rife.

Paris was bursting at the seams.

But with such brutal urbanisation came a craving for escape.

So Gautier came up with a pastoral idyll.

A forest setting, in a romanticised Germany from another age -

the 15th century.

There is an atavistic idea that we're going back to a time

when humans lived in more harmony with nature, with the forest.

That was a dream of the 19th-century, as it is now a dream.

Now we talk about wilding, and re-wilding,

and making these ecological friendships between the lost world

of the organic and ourselves in our industrial state.

But the 19th century was definitely very, very aware of that,

and very anxious about that.

So the 19th century audience will have connected with Giselle

in a visceral way.

But by commissioning Akram Khan to make a new version of Giselle

for the 21st-century, it was a great opportunity,

and for me, an important one, to make it connect with us now,

through our own contemporary concerns.

And one, two, three.

One, two, three. One, two, one, two, three.

I was, kind of, not sure where we were going to land Giselle,

where we were going to place this, what world it was going to be in.

And we kept on coming up with the issue about migrants,

and it has a huge impact on all of us, really.

And so we wanted Giselle to be placed in that world.

Just do it again. I'll tell you exactly when, what count it is on the top.

One, two, three.

One, two, three. One, two...

If I could place Giselle in a world that is happening around

us today, it would mean much more...

..somehow, without losing focus on Giselle itself,

the essence of the narrative.

Akram has transposed the forest village to a walled-off factory,

and a community of dispossessed migrants,

dependent on the factory owners for work.

When I see the classical ballet, it's absolutely powerful and relevant.

It's just, I wanted to approach it differently,

so I had to go to the essence of it.

The narrative itself is extremely pure and simple.

It's actually how do we...

..re-change the way we say it.

In Akram's world, Giselle is also full of life,

but she's not a naive young girl -

she's a passionate woman.

She's independent, she's stronger, she's not ill.

We thought long and hard about this.

Is the illness what makes her different to her peers?

And we believe it isn't.

It is her essence, her spirit, her love for life and joy of dancing.

Six, seven, go. One, two, three.

Two, two, three, three...

Creating a modern Giselle also allows us to sharpen

the spiritual themes of the ballet -

love and betrayal.

Both of these themes are driven by the character Albrecht.

In the original he's an aristocrat,

in our new version he is from the world of the factory owners,

and has disguised himself in order to seduce Giselle.

But he's no pantomime villain.

In both ballets he will undergo a change from seducer to someone

truly in love.

And the contemporary setting really brings this home.

Him being of nobility has taken an element of his life away

that he wishes to experience.

And that's why, I believe,

he must have initially ventured into the world of the immigrants,

and then fallen in love with this incredible woman.

So he lives, sort of, a double life.

For me, we all feel like we've been in love before.

And until you find true love, you don't realise what true love is.

And I believe that Albrecht has found true love in Giselle.

One, two, three.

This love is very tangible in Akram's version of the ballet.

It's sensual and intimate.

This is very significant for me, if I was Albrecht.

To allow somebody to touch my face,

and I was thinking of my culture in India, we never touch face.

Yeah. Yeah.

So...

-LAUGHTER

-Do you know what I mean?

To do this is really intimate.

Only husband and wife.

The beautiful thing with dance is that it's a dialogue of emotion,

without the filter of intellect.

Words can be so easily manipulated.

But when you put a character in front of an audience,

only through their emotions, through what they're feeling for each other,

or about themselves,

it is just a wonderful experience.

Such emotions are easy for us to understand

through contemporary choreography.

But in the original, it was equally important to convey emotion,

even if ballet was much more formalised then.

So when it comes to the seduction scene, in the original

the convention was to use mime -

gestures of the hands and arms to portray character.

Traditionally, these gestures were understood by most of the audience.

Today, most of the audience wouldn't understand this

very codified language.

So we tried to do it in a way that is more gesture than pantomime.

In a way that's more a natural reaction of the character.

So for the young, wide-eyed girl,

there's a coyness and a charm much more of its time.

There is also a poignancy in seeing how Giselle falls for Albrecht.

Look at my beautiful dress that I've been sewing.

I would love to sit, may I?

Um... OK.

But that's a little bit uncomfortable.

I feel you're too close.

I feel you're too close. I'm going home.

Sorry.

I can't even look at him.

It's just...too much.

It's a little bit too much.

Just one minute. Just one minute.

She's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

-Like you.

-I swear I will love her.

No, no, don't swear.

That brings bad luck.

But, wait, I have an idea.

We can try with a daisy.

The daisy will tell us if you love me or not.

-How does that work?

-Well, I'll show you, and I'll let you sit,

-if you want.

-OK.

-One, he loves me.

-OK.

-He loves me not.

-All right.

Let's count them. Yes, no, yes, no, yes...

He loves me not.

Look, you made a mistake.

He loves me, yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes...

-OK.

-You see?

Since the 16th century, mime had always been an essential part

of dance. But that will change in act two,

because ballet itself was at a crossroads.

It was the music that also put Giselle at the front

of a new artistic development.

Reflecting the cultural changes brought about by Romanticism,

the composer, Adolphe Adam came up with a score that really brought

the story to life, and paved the way for ballet music to come.

So imagine we're in 1841, sitting in the theatre,

and after years and years of ballet scores that start with a hodgepodge

of themes from the ballet, we come into the ballet, the lights go down,

the conductor comes into the pit, and you hear this...

EXUBERANT ORCHESTRATION

Innovation, and that's the thing I think of what I think of Adolphe Adam -

this massive, tumbling, tumultuous string phrase

that doesn't sound like we are going to sit back and have an evening's entertainment,

or a ballet plot that's quite easy and facile for us to grasp and to learn.

This is a ballet that challenged - certainly, it did musically.

So we're fully aware, as classical musicians now,

of something called leitmotif.

Now a leitmotif is a small theme -

it can be anything that depicts one particular character,

or one particular environment.

Adam was using this a long time before the undoubted king

of the leitmotif, Richard Wagner.

Wagner, in fact, was in the audience at the premiere of Giselle, so,

who is to say that, you know,

the greatest operatic cycle of all time

had been influenced by a ballet.

So Giselle's theme is immediately distinctive.

In the theme you hear the use of what's known as a major sixth,

which means there are six notes between the bottom note...

..and the top note. And the sixth is a very important interval,

as they're called, in the character of Giselle.

Most of her themes, most of the music to which she dances, or acts,

involves that major sixth.

Adam uses leitmotifs throughout the ballet.

He connected the audiences directly with the character.

And here, music and mime are perfectly fused for dramatic effect.

As we meet Hilarion, Giselle's peasant suitor...

..Adam leaves us in no doubt as to how he feels.

So Adam, like so many ballet composers after him - but he did it first, really -

he's putting into music what we would put into words.

Adam, all of a sudden, has given us a look ahead

to the romantic tone poem in terms of how he's written ballet.

Because it's coherent, and it's a long sequence of music

that marries in both dance and acting,

plot, everything is all in one analogous whole.

What we're seeing here is Giselle as a crucial building block

in the flowering of ballet.

It's moving away from rigid formality

towards a much more emotional art form.

But I also think there is something else at work.

Giselle is showing us a clash of classes,

and also the consequences of that collision.

Gautier and his collaborator Vernoy de Saint-Georges,

both well-educated intellectuals,

would have been well aware of the inequalities in French society,

and its attitudes towards women.

With the Industrial Revolution came not just an underclass,

but a new, wealthy middle class.

The women in this new bourgeoisie were to be respected, revered,

and, above all, virtuous.

But, for the lord and master,

women outside this privileged sphere were fair game.

One of the things I discovered while we were reimagining Giselle

is how strong this work is.

How powerful, how deeply moving, and also, how political.

Once you take it out of the beautiful box

of the European Middle Ages,

questions of class, lack of jobs, lack of opportunities, immigration,

can completely...

..sit there, and gain even more profound meaning.

It was a revelation to me to see something that,

because of the environment in which it was set,

never came across as strongly...

..as it did in the new version.

Giselle and Albrecht can never be truly equal in the eyes of society,

and that's the tragedy at the heart of the ballet.

The point at which their two classes collide happens in both versions,

but we've really upped the stakes in Akram's.

The ruling elite, Albrecht's people, arrive from their privileged enclave

onto the streets of Giselle's world.

Real choices will have to be made, as among them is Bathilde,

Albrecht's upper-class fiancee.

For Akram, Hilarion plays a central part in this choice.

He is a social climber, a go-between,

on whom the landlords bestow status to keep the workers in their place.

For me, the hat is something really special for him,

because it's from the landlords.

It's like a gift, like, saying, "We respect you."

And that's how he takes it.

He gets the hat, and he's the boss.

He's the type of guy who knows how to survive.

He's like a cockroach.

And it's about wanting to have people respect him, and look up to him.

And at the same time, he has this such deep love for Giselle.

That's what motivates him, I think.

With his new-found status, Hilarion feels empowered to provoke his rival

into revealing himself.

The choice Albrecht must now make feeds directly

into the 19th-century ethos -

should he accept the rules laid down by convention,

or should he follow his own path and heart?

The stories I have in my head, it's obviously an arranged marriage.

But I think, certainly, the love between Bathilde and Albrecht

isn't true love, and he's felt true love with Giselle.

But he's obviously put in a predicament,

he obviously has the challenge of still being nobility,

and Albrecht realises that we can't live in harmony.

Albrecht's decision is Gautier's Romantic philosophy writ large.

For him, bourgeois values are selfish and small-minded.

In fact, he wrote...

"Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need,

"and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting...

"..like his poor, weak nature."

But Gautier's disgust at the new middle classes didn't prevent him

from coming up with ideas that appealed to them.

Albrecht's betrayal and rejection pushes Giselle over the edge,

into a very 19th-century preoccupation - madness.

She is a person of heart, and her heart is liable to break,

in more ways than one.

And that runs very central to the, kind of,

rather morbid fascinations of Romanticism with the sick girl.

It is the woman as a screen for anxiety's dreams.

Madness, particularly in women,

was a very live concern for the 19th-century Parisian audience.

In the decades around Giselle,

the science of psychiatry was beginning to take shape,

and madness, and other nervous diseases

received particular attention, especially in regard to women,

who made up the majority of those in asylums.

The French had a word for madness - hysteria,

from the Greek word for uterus.

Previous vocabularies would have been uterine fury,

the fury, the anger of the uterus.

There was what some historians have called a culture of hysteria...

..but one should make the point that the vision that we have of hysteria

is a male vision...

of females.

The story of hysteria is also, of course, a story of male prejudice

and, in Germany and other parts of Europe, class prejudice.

At the Paris Opera, the girls in the corps de ballet were usually

lower class women, and sport for their bourgeois patrons.

Old-time French psychiatrists would have, perhaps,

mentioned the idea of hysteria as a form of rebellion.

It might be a rebellion of women against the male control of society,

and jobs, it might be a rebellion in favour of more sexual happiness.

Hysterical people are interested in life,

and everything that life has to offer.

And that, of course, has its risks.

Gautier's Giselle is driven mad by society's contradictions.

I think we can all understand how it feels to...

..lose ground under your own feet.

How painful an experience it is,

when you realise that what you always thought to be true...

..is not.

So how far do you take it

is entirely up to each individual ballerina.

So we witness Giselle reliving her moments with Albrecht.

Everything she's done, she wonders, that must have been a lie,

or was that real?

I think it's more of a questioning, and loss of reality.

I think she's completely broken, not so much in her mind,

but it's in her heart.

Everything just...

collapses.

Yet the mind just tries to still find a reason to think it was real.

She hopes for that one glimpse of the fact that it was true love,

and within the scene, she cannot find it until the very last moment.

And this is the pivotal point in the ballet.

At the last minute, Albrecht realises

that he truly loves Giselle,

breaking the bond of class and convention.

It doesn't matter that he realised the bond of this love too late,

because, to her, it was real.

That last one moment when I run towards him, for one second,

we look into each other's eyes, and just before she dies,

she finds him.

For one second, we're both at the same level.

Act one ends with Giselle's death.

But 21st-century audiences don't relate to madness and weak hearts

in quite the same way as they used to,

so we've changed it.

Instead, our Giselle is murdered...

by Hilarion.

And this brings us to act two,

where the familiar world becomes frightening and unfamiliar.

Up to this point, our 19th-century drama has been very earthbound.

But as the sun sets on Giselle's forest,

a darker side of her home is revealed.

The forest is, really, emblematic.

The forest is the mysterious place, the trackless place,

the place where paths are lost easily,

where you can very quickly become disorientated,

where there are mysterious figures.

Gautier is someone who drew on a lot of folktales and fairy tales,

east to west.

And that whole area of retrieval,

of Northern and Eastern European folklore,

that all began happening around the beginning of the 19th century.

And it was a folk tale that was one of the other inspirations for Giselle.

Gautier's friend, the poet Heinrich Heine,

had written in his book De l'Allemagne

about irresistible female phantoms rising from the grave.

He wrote...

"In their stilled hearts and lifeless feet,

"the passion for dancing,

"which they could not satisfy in their lifetime, still burns.

"At midnight, they rise,

"and woe betide any young man who crosses their path.

"They surround him with unbridled desire,

"and he must dance with them until he falls, dead."

These otherworldly images fed directly

into Gautier's Romantic vision.

For him, the supernatural was everywhere,

even though we couldn't see it.

And there is no coincidence that, at the same time,

science was making headway into previously unseen worlds.

Microscopes were being invented, magnetism researched.

Even spiritualism and psychic phenomena were embraced and analysed

as legitimate areas of enquiry.

For Gautier, science wasn't so much disproving the supernatural,

but somehow reinforcing its existence.

He even went walking around in cemeteries,

to immerse himself in the mysterious forces and currents

he believed surrounded him.

These forces take on a demonic form in the second act,

when we are plunged into the supernatural domain

of Heine's female phantoms.

These are the Wilis.

There is a Slavic word, "vila", a female vampire.

Its plural, "vile", summons a terrifying horde of them.

In the ballet, they are the angry spirits of women

jilted by their lovers.

From beyond the grave, they will make Albrecht, ultimately,

pay for what he has done.

These female spectres have been part of folklore for millennia.

The Greeks had the Furies, vengeful daughters of the night.

They appear in Serbia as maidens, cursed by God,

and in Bulgaria as young girls that died before they were baptised.

They might have been fantastical creatures,

but their grievances were very real -

they hurt, they were bitter,

and they craved retribution.

Gautier gives us, and the ballet gives us,

what happens to women's energies when they pass that threshold.

And here there's, you know, a whole other area of desire and anxiety,

which is that women just don't lie down quietly when they die,

they're not benevolent goddesses of death.

The Wilis are personifications of frenzied eternity

that engulfs everything it touches.

They actually have truly demonic power.

In fact, Heine's folktale also had a more tangible resonance.

He was intoxicated by the Parisian women he saw at soirees and balls,

dancing with a burning joy in life, and longing for sweet

and sensuous oblivion.

He said they were almost terrible in their beauty.

The Wilis, with their frenzied revenge, express, I think,

some of that fear that men and women, probably,

but men had about the energy of sex,

when it was considered to be sinful.

And the solution of the 19th century is to in a way

imagine retributions, there's no confrontation with the, sort of,

beauty and energy of sexuality,

there's much more anxiety about how to...

How it should be justly dealt with.

So it's a punitive ethos.

This is the return of the repressed,

and the idea of punishment and retribution is a universal one.

One that we also explore with Akram Khan.

The second act is set in a dilapidated factory which is haunted

by the ghosts of women, victims of industrial accidents

caused by greed, neglect,

or exhaustion.

Here, Akram's Wilis seek retribution on the factory owners

who caused their deaths.

This group of women were like an army with bamboo sticks.

It is kind of like a mix between watching Kill Bill...

..and a horror movie.

You know, there's something about it that's very martial arts.

But, at the same time, very threatening and violent and aggressive.

I didn't want the spirits just to be pretty.

Why the hell would they be pretty?

They've just been...

Their life has been destroyed.

It is the murderer, Hilarion, who faces the Wilis' retribution first.

These highly trained dancers - it's really an army of warriors.

And, so, really, it's a meeting of their technique

and the vocabulary that I was looking for.

So Akram not only gives the Wilis vicious sticks,

but he exploits the dancers' classical training, in pointe shoes.

The pointe shoes were not just to elevate them,

but they were also a weapon.

They are a weapon of justice.

A weapon of rage.

From the pointe of the pointe shoes, all the way to the head,

is like a knife, it's the vertical.

It's the thing that connects Earth to heaven,

the tip of your toe to the top of your head.

And there's something very spiritual about that.

Even if pointe shoes are an essential part of a ballerina's life

today, it is still quite unusual for contemporary choreographers to use them.

But then, 175 years ago, when Giselle premiered,

being en pointe was also quite a new phenomenon.

It was to be one extraordinary ballerina that took dancing en pointe,

and through her skill,

made it the mainstay of virtually every ballet since.

She was like a rock star - Marie Taglioni.

Taglioni was the first one to establish the hairstyle

that many young dancers still adopt today.

The classical middle parting, with the hair kept tight and close.

Her adoring fans longed to perfect her ethereal look,

even drinking vinegar and water

to make themselves pale and interesting.

But Taglioni had one amazing quality.

The reinforced pointe shoe as we know it today didn't exist -

Taglioni just had satin slippers.

And through her sheer strength alone,

she danced on the tips of her toes.

Taglioni set the template for ballerinas.

But it was a young Italian dancer who would take up her baton

and create Giselle -

Carlotta Grisi.

Grisi could be earthy and sensual, but also otherworldly.

Plus, she was in the right place at the right time.

Not only was Gautier in love with her,

but she was married to one of the choreographers, Jules Perrot.

With Giselle, they fashioned a watershed moment

in the history of ballet.

The pointe shoe, the weightless, tragic female,

the vision of a supernatural world,

all combined to create the first truly defining role

for any ballerina.

And now, the full force of this vision is realised,

as Giselle is brought back from the dead by the Queen of the Wilis,

who commands her to dance.

What about forward?

'So the stage is now set for, perhaps, the key theme

'of the ballet - forgiveness.'

And here is where Giselle really steps out of the past.

The mime elements have largely gone,

and we get a taste of what ballet was to become.

A synthesis of character, plot and emotion in movement.

This becomes really clear when Albrecht comes to Giselle's grave

and encounters her spirit.

For me, this is the heart of the ballet.

A pas de deux, a declaration of love,

through which Giselle forgives him.

The whole pas de deux is very fragile,

because it is a communication between souls.

You are kind of feeling each other, like you would feel a ghost

crossing through you.

So, in a way, I'm trying to become ethereal,

so that what I do when I get close to him, is I go inside him,

into his soul, and transform him.

How to interpret a spirit?

It is not a solid being that moves in unison,

it is something made out of almost air.

And as she moves, she leaves a trail.

And it was choreographer Jules Perott

that translated this into dance.

This is fluid movement that conveys pure emotion,

and it's not histrionic gesture or mime.

As you can see, I lift the arms behind, and the legs behind,

to give the feeling that I float in the wind.

What Perott did was capture exactly the essence of Gautier's

melancholic spirit.

I think it's a combination of the arms and also the legs

-staying always in movement.

-Yeah.

Like a leaf, or like a feather in the wind,

that should bend while the wind pushes it forward.

And this isn't just our interpretation.

Jules Perrot had choreographed much of its expressiveness

very specifically.

There's a section at the end that Giselle should literally look as if

she's completely flying across the stage.

And the secret is that the man looks quite unattractive,

running in parallel really, really quickly

whilst holding on to Giselle.

It's really tricky because we are trying to go in that direction,

keeping the same position with her.

For the man, it's really important to go completely parallel,

which is something that we are not really used to doing while

keeping her towards the audience,

so it's quite an uncomfortable position,

and quite a different use of muscle

for that part of the ballet - it comes when you are the most tired.

Usually the ballerina is the only one to enjoy it, that time.

SHE LAUGHS

In effect, what Perrot was beginning to formulate here,

along with the other choreographer, Jean Coralli,

was a new dance language, one that we now recognise

as classical ballet.

But to make something new for our 21st-century reimagining of Giselle,

we wanted to take what is at the heart of this pas de deux,

forgiveness, and give it a more visceral spin.

The act of forgiveness in Giselle is an area of human beings

that we are losing touch with,

and forgiveness is being replaced by judgment.

That quality that we have as human beings is eroding,

and I really love the sense of being raw, or exploring that area.

You go here.

So to get to the heart of the act of forgiveness,

Akram puts Giselle in a terrible position.

She has to make a choice,

in the same way that Albrecht did in the first act.

Pull her, pull her, pull her, pull her.

Yes. Release. Good.

In Akram's supernatural world,

we find a grief-stricken Albrecht resigned to his fate

at the hands of the Wilis.

But it is Giselle who will decide what his fate is.

The tables are turned -

now she is given the power that she never had in life.

I think dance can tap in to a person who's witnessing it

in a way that no other art form can.

Because dance has the possibility of questions.

It has the power of ambiguity, and yet, great clarity.

And the power of dance also has the sense to rise above,

into a poetic sense, and damn, I miss poetry, I really do,

in the world we live in today.

I miss being suspended.

After all Giselle has been through, she forgives him.

This, for me, is ultimately why this story has endured.

I guess her truth is that she is naive and loving.

And then, after death, she is generous and forgiving.

And so if you...

stick to that, to that essence,

it really doesn't matter whether you were born in the 19th century,

20th century, 21st-century,

because that is something that we can all relate to...

..and we can try to emulate.

Back in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had its ills,

but there were some advantages too

that had a direct impact on this ballet.

Mechanisation enabled a whole new range of materials to be made,

and for ballet, this meant the introduction of feather-light,

almost transparent fabrics.

A new, lightweight netting named after the French city where it was

invented, Tulle, was perfect for shimmering, diaphanous spirits.

Even today, it's an essential element in our costumes.

But it was another by-product of the Industrial Revolution

that transformed the stage into a mesmerising spectacle - gaslight.

In the early 19th century, people went to the theatre

literally to be seen.

The auditorium was as bright as the stage.

But with gaslight,

designers had a whole new palette of effects to play with.

Now they could create atmospheric landscapes - a forest at twilight,

or a moonlit graveyard.

What's more, they could darken the auditorium so that everybody

was drawn to the stage.

A lot of what we see now as absolutely familiar conventions

would have been astonishing to audiences at the time.

I mean, this was the space of illusion, the space where

real women and real men were performing,

but were somehow transformed.

So the familiar had become sort of deeply unfamiliar.

It's much more like an image in the mind, it's like a vision,

dancing all in white, wafting across the stage

as if they were weightless.

It goes through my mind like a wreath of smoke.

And that, in a way, is what the ballet is trying to be.

It's very close to a dream image.

But that is not just an aesthetic thing.

In its ability to structure and order,

it actually functions to keep at bay all that unruly noise,

chaos, horror, that we experience.

And that is so true of Giselle.

The 19th-century audience would have experienced its tragedy,

but also have been transported to a place of hope.

By the end of act two, Giselle has danced with Albrecht all night,

keeping him from the full wrath of the Wilis.

And just as the Wilis are about to destroy Albrecht, a new day dawns.

The Wilis are banished, and Albrecht is saved.

But when it comes to the 21st-century Giselle,

it is not the dawning day that saves Albrecht.

Akram's other-world is grim and hard,

not enchanting.

But the beauty, the message of hope, comes from Giselle herself.

There's transformation and metamorphosis in life, and in death.

So in a sense, I've always been fascinated by transformation

because, in that moment, lies the sacred.

Somewhere in that place lies the sacred.

Giselle's transformation in both ballets is not only physical,

but spiritual.

We are so terrified of beauty now.

Giselle has given me new belief, again, that something

that is beautiful can still be beautiful.

It's something that's been there for hundreds of years, by great,

great choreographers. I just did a version of my own,

but the elemental thing about it is that it's so sacred, it's beautiful.

In some ways, this is a reflection on Theophile Gautier's

own 19th-century credo.

Art for art's sake.

Beauty above all.

The ballet Giselle is a hymn to the healing power of beauty.

Eventually Giselle must leave Albrecht to face his own real-world, alone.

In two short acts, Giselle has taken us on a transformative journey.

At its premiere in Paris on the 28th of June, 1841, it was a sensation.

With Giselle, the face and emotional heart of dance had changed forever,

and it formulated a tradition that has inspired audiences,

dancers and choreographers ever since.

But really, I think Giselle has endured because it speaks

profound truths to us -

love, betrayal, forgiveness.

And, at its heart, is Giselle herself,

someone who could live in any age.

I find that Giselle is a character that cleanses you as a human being.

Something, hopefully, inside changes,

I think that's part of what I love so much, to be a dancer,

is the opportunity to become other people,

and by becoming other people,

becoming a better person myself.

Well...

So it's quite a...

..beautiful thing to do.