Review: Akram Khan’s Giselle, Bristol Hippodrome – ’Bewitching and topical’

Billed as one of the greatest romantic ballets of all time, Giselle is the story of innocence, love and betrayal.

A young peasant girl, Giselle, is in love with Albrecht, a duke who hides his title and his engagement to another. When Giselle discovers he has deceived her, she is driven to madness and dies of a broken heart.

Late at night, the Wilis gather by her grave, ready to welcome her into their fold as the vengeful spirits of betrayed brides, who force men to dance to their death. Giselle, despite the betrayal, still loves her duke and protects him from the Wilis until dawn. In doing so, she is also saved from becoming a Wili and is able to pass on, while Albrecht is forced to live with the consequences of his deception.

It’s a famous story but this production is so much more than the plot – a rich, utterly terrifying, modern incarnation with a sumptuous score and a starkly topical message.

‘Giselle’ is the first full-length ballet choreographed by Akram Khan

Akram Khan’s version of Giselle flips the 19th-century original set in a medieval Rhineland village on its head – setting the story in a condemned garment factory on an industrial wasteland.

Khan is a British dancer of Bangladeshi descent, and not a ballet choreographer but trained in kathak, a northern Indian dance form. He has recently reimagined Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book through a bleak, post-apocalyptic lens where Mowgli is saved by animals who have taken over idle land in the wake of climate disaster.

In his production of Giselle, there’s new music, decor and costumes, but above all a new type of dancing which draws on kathak, a kind of traditional Indian dance, and ballet.

The style a surprisingly natural match. It produces a powerful but discomfortingly uneasy effect at times; the throng of dancers take on the weight of machinery in their bodies in time, their feet drumming on the floor in unison.

More than 300,000 people are thought to have seen the show

The set and costume design by the Hong Kong-born designer Tim Yip rises to the scale of Khan’s choreography. An imposing stone wall acts as a class barrier between Albrecht and Giselle and it is used cleverly and hauntingly for dramatic effect throughout. As the curtain opens in act one, we see a crowd of bodies pushing against it, desperately trying to make it budge. As they step away, handprints are left behind on its surface.

Perhaps once of the ballet’s most striking moments is when the wall rotates to reveal Albrecht’s fiancé, Bathilde, and her friends emerge all their costumed splendour – the antithesis of the migrant workers’ own tattered tunics.

Yip uses of shadows and silhouettes throughout the show to convey the anonymity of the Outcasts, whose worlds are made up of sweatshops and poverty.

Thursday’s show was also impeccably performed. The highlights were in the title role’s journey from sprightly, love-dazed to disoriented and duped, making the central romantic storyline register strongly and tragically.

Giselle was beautiful ballet – and a hauntingly enjoyable piece of theatre –  that attracted young and old to Bristol Hippodrome on its first of two performances in the city.

All photos: Laurent Liotardo

Read next:

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• Bristol Hippodrome announces hit musical Hamilton coming to Bristol
• Celebrating All Things Dance at The Mount Without

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