Thoroughly Modern Giselle

When the Kirov brought a new production of “Sleeping Beauty” to New York a few months ago, a critic acquaintance who lives there told me she was boycotting the ballet on principle.

“It’s just such a sexist story,” she told me. “Sometimes you have to draw the line.”

Ah--the fairy tale dilemma. How can women today enjoy watching a passive princess who needs a passing prince for a wake-up call?

Well then, I asked her, what about “Giselle,” which the Kirov also was presenting?

As ballet people know, poor Giselle is the 19th century poster girl for feminine self-sacrifice--a trusting peasant maid who is dumped by a thoughtless cad, dies from the shock of it all, and then, instead of resting in peace in the second act, opts to save his lousy hide from a vengeful corps of female spirits who try to kill him.

Stereotypes galore. There is a whole line of feminist thinking that suggests that if Giselle’s self-esteem weren’t so low, she’d deck the clueless ex-boyfriend in the first act, or leave him to his fate in the second, and get on with her own life--or afterlife, as the case may be.

Given this amount of ammunition, I guessed that the critic would shoot down the idea of seeing “Giselle,” too.

“Oh well, ‘Giselle,’ ” she said, with a shrug in her voice. “You have to see ‘Giselle.’ ”

*

Of course, she was right. If you don’t see any other 19th century story ballet, you have to see this one. “Giselle”--no matter how modern you are--is irresistible. That’s mostly because of Giselle herself, who just keeps being pure and hopeful and dancing beautifully while she rises above every obstacle thrown at her. A survivor. Well, she does die physically, but she manages to survive in more important ways, ever since her original appearance in Paris in 1842.

The rest of the 19th century classics sometimes get overblown with too many acts and too many allegorical characters. Even if you don’t think their version of retro gender roles is dangerous, you sometimes feel like skipping them.

But “Giselle” is another story--an easy-to-follow story, for one thing, and a resonant one, a pleasure in two acts. The themes in “Giselle” are not only eternal, they’re straightforward. There’s true love, betrayal, forgiveness and a deliciously scored sense of doom, gloom and frail hope. It’s a kind of “life is hard and then you die--and even then you have to save someone else” thing. But you go home knowing how to take the high road and how to look good while you’re doing it.

It’s not that you can’t find universal themes in other 19th century ballets, but it’s sometimes harder to put yourself in the shoes of their main characters. Consider the eternal “Swan Lake”--how many of us can really relate to a woman who flaps her arms when she’s interested in a man? And God forbid women should start identifying with the exoticized heroines of “La Bayadere” or “Le Corsaire”--they’re either serving ungrateful men in a temple somewhere or being sold into slavery by blackguards with cheesy mustaches.

What you have in Giselle is one of 19th century ballet’s rare working-class heroines. Granted, she doesn’t seem to work a lot; in the first act the whole village is hauling in the grape harvest while Giselle skips around with Albrecht, her intended. But it’s usually made clear that Giselle has a weak heart, so we can think of her as enjoying a well-deserved sick day.

From the moment she emerges from her decidedly downscale but picturesque cottage, we know that she isn’t likely to be faking it. After all, she does breathe hard occasionally when she dances, and she just seems so sincere.

She’s not a privileged royal or a trophy in the realm of evil potentates or pirates; nor is she cursed by a witch or a sorcerer. She’s just a trusting human being who goes through stages we can all understand--falling for someone, discovering love is fickle, nearly going postal (the famous mad scene) but choosing the high road, forgiveness. She copes--and she does it with class.

Of course, not everyone falls for Giselle. In the last half of this century, she’s come under fire, and not only from feminists who think she’s stuck in a victim mentality. Although the ballet is called the “Hamlet” role for ballerinas because of its technical and emotional challenges, the high-flown melodrama comes in for criticism--more Barbara Cartland than Shakespeare.

But surely the way Giselle copes with her fate makes her a more complex character than a romance-novel heroine. She does die in the process of becoming a better person--a fate that awaits so many women who have loved too much in ballet and opera. It appears that her heart just gives out when she meets Albrecht’s other fiancee. But death actually turns into a character-building opportunity for Giselle, since she rises from the grave and gets the whole second act to exert her will.

As a besotted peasant girl, she isn’t in control of her fate--she’s too bleary-eyed from first-stage romantic bliss, an easy target for a faithless suitor. But in the forest, when she’s drafted into the angry corps of wilis--a kind of man-hating commando unit in tulle--she suddenly gains control over her situation.

When Albrecht is cornered by the wilis, Giselle is canny, pleading his case plaintively with Myrtha, the head wili. She buys time and keeps Albrecht safe from his enemies (by dancing, of course) until sunrise breaks their power over him. Even though she’s doing all this for the man who did her wrong, when feminists say they’d rather see Giselle deck Albrecht, they’re buying into a “Rambo” mentality--or, heaven forbid, a Lorena Bobbitt mentality. Giselle is above all that.

*

The ballet, however, is not without a frisson of gratuitous violence. Although Giselle is able to save Albrecht, the wilis do manage to kill off an expendable male character: Hilarion, the failed suitor of Giselle who had uncovered her betrayal in a crude public fashion. With their implacable faces and geometric power moves, the wilis muscle the hapless Hilarion offstage to his death. They’re a reminder how cruel the world is without people like Giselle in it. Hilarion’s death is simply a hate crime--he wasn’t even a guilty man, just a man. Giselle certainly would have saved him, too, if the libretto writers just had more respect for secondary characters.

In fact, historical evidence points to the fact that the 19th century creators of the ballet did not envision Giselle quite the way contemporary viewers might. They seemed to be a chauvinistic bunch, who often saw ballerinas as expendable sex objects. Back then, an arabesque was admired chiefly because it showed bare female legs and shoulders to best advantage.

But Giselle danced beyond their control into the 20th century. She’s become the epitome of what it is to “rise above”--somewhat literally, because ballet choreography so often enacts heavenly aspirations. In her long, gauzy wili-wear, Giselle floats upward time and again, touching ground only to drift into prayerful poses. It’s hard to think of a ballerina nowadays as a sex object, what with Victoria’s Secret models so readily available. Over the years, Giselle has become less sexy and more iconic--her true purpose in life.

Her wili colleagues are less evolved. They provide the openhearted Giselle with the perfect contrast as the enforcers--jilted, jaded souls who say with every warding-off gesture of their countless outstretched arms, “Not everyone is that forgiving, Jack.”

Although Albrecht’s faithlessness and Giselle’s sensitivity may be seen as archetypal masculine and feminine ways of operating, the ballet’s themes go beyond the simplistic Mars and Venus paradigm. Like a sage or a saint, Giselle has a nature that combines male and female aspects. Her goodness is no more confined to female “nature” than infidelity is confined to that of men. Even though there are traditional gender markers onstage, audiences are surely creative enough to choose the character traits they identify with most.

*

Personally, I’d like to be Giselle, full of love and forgiveness; but sometimes I feel like Albrecht, the person who makes mistakes and has to live with them. And occasionally, I’m like the wilis--just saying “no” because someone crosses me. In the ballet, everyone goes their separate ways as dawn breaks. Giselle fades into her afterlife, perhaps prepared to rest in peace, maybe deciding to continue dancing up a storm to rescue the needy when she can.

As a wili, it won’t be easy. According to legends and poetry that were better known by Giselle’s original audiences, the outlook for a wili is not good. It’s literally a dead-end job because it’s a species of vampire--the word comes from “vili,” the Slavic root of the word “vampire.” But the legend doesn’t say what happens when one wili defies the pack. And legends are notorious for taking on new significance in new contexts.

I see Giselle as a renegade wili, out to break the chain of pointless violence. Because she died of the shock of betrayal, she was drafted into a group of other abandoned women to exact retribution. But she didn’t buy the party line. Sure, she could have taken up the cycle of revenge; it might have felt good for a few hours to slice and dice the guy who forgot to mention he was already engaged. But where would it end?

In this ballet, the buck stops with Giselle. Forgiveness is the challenge. I can imagine that her next move is to convert the wilis from their heartless vigilante ways. Maybe they could just scare the faithless lovers a little, encourage an epiphany. It works for Albrecht. When the curtain falls, he’s usually left alone, shaken and bereft.

Over the years, successive Albrechts seem to have humanized the character and made it clear he’s learned a lesson. When Mikhail Baryshnikov played him, for instance, he clearly looked devastated, knowing he blew it and he’d never be happy again. At the very least, he’ll suffer a lot and come out of it a better person. It’s still revenge, in a way, but it’s also progress, effected through the superhuman character of Giselle.

That’s why, even if you disdain retro fairy tales, you still have to go and see “Giselle.” (Actually, even Aurora, the ostensibly passive princess of “Sleeping Beauty,” can be redeemed, but that’s another story.) We just can’t afford to lose all of ballet’s best heroines, not when contemporary women put their hearts and their masterful dancing into Giselle. And not while today’s audiences can find their own resonance in old stories.

There is no need to boycott Giselle, just rediscover her in the luminous light of the present.

*

“Giselle,” San Francisco Ballet, Oct. 6-9, 8 p.m., Oct. 9-10, 2 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $10-$68. (714) 556-2787.