Working Herself Into a Passion

Sylvie Guillem can get her leg up behind her ear faster than the rest of us can blink, one of the charms that has placed her among the world’s most sought-after ballerinas. But in a low-ceilinged rehearsal room on the sixth floor of Teatro alla Scala on a scorching morning in June, Guillem is taking a whirl as choreographer, excavating the soul of Giselle, that classic weak-hearted 19th century heroine who dies upon the double-edged sword of love, finding the grace to pardon her betrayer in the next world.

Guillem’s long, muscular frame is outfitted in black and gray workout clothes, her long, red-tinted hair in a braid, a thick gold Greek choker around her slender neck.

It’s the morning after the premiere of Guillem’s La Scala production of “Giselle,” and as she rehearses the second cast, she buzzes with hummingbird energy, singing along to the piano accompaniment one minute, jumping to her feet to grab one of the dancers by the shoulders the next. Her offstage manner is marked by a restless tomboyishness all the more startling in a dancer who has for so long personified our Juliette, our Cinderella, our Sleeping Beauty, our Giselle.

This is Draft 2 of Guillem’s 1998 production of “Giselle,” done for the Finnish National Ballet in Helsinki. The La Scala production has new sets and costumes by English designer Paul Brown and has been reworked by Guillem. It arrives at the Orange County Performing Arts Center tonight for its U.S. premiere, with Guillem dancing the principal role in three of four performances, before moving on to New York’s Lincoln Center Festival and London’s Royal Opera House later this summer.

Guillem considers herself an accidental choreographer. Her “Giselle” began when she was asked which classic ballet she would most like to put on film.

“I thought of ‘Giselle’ right away,” she says after rehearsal in La Scala’s canteen. “It allows for a kind of close-up. It’s a pretty complex story psychologically, and a camera can show that. In ‘Giselle,’ the character is there.”

After reading the script, the director of the Finnish National Ballet, Jorma Uotinen, suggested that she stage it instead. And in some ways, Guillem has brought a cinematic sensibility to her naturalistic reworking of the 1841 classic, which she once danced with Rudolf Nureyev at the Paris Opera Ballet.

“The thing that always bothered me was the incoherence,” she says of the ballet, which she thought had been suffocated by old-fashioned theatrical gestures and direction that merely mimicked the rich emotion of the story.

“I wanted to make the story live, make the character live. If she wasn’t alive, then the rest of it wasn’t believable,” she says, adding that she didn’t set out to change the choreography but found herself tweaking 80% of the steps to accommodate different blocking and storytelling details. “For a director, it’s not simply about taking the liberty to change the classics, but to try to make them understood.”

This, Guillem says, means putting the story before the steps, asking her dancers to think of themselves as actors first. With her phenomenal physical technique, Guillem has sometimes been called more an acrobat than an interpreter. But she says the dramatic content of any work has always been her fundamental concern.

“I love the choreography,” she says, “but I want it more than anything to be a vehicle that transports emotions.”

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During opening-night intermission in the La Scala foyer, a pair of local dance writers traded reactions about Act I. One said she found the production fresh and new; the other thought it wasn’t traditional enough to be called classic and not radical enough to be a revolution.

That intermission chatter was indicative of the critical response to Guillem’s work the first time around in Helsinki. A review in the London Independent called it “gloriously restored.” London’s Daily Telegraph, on the other hand, said that Guillem had “let her passions run away with her, at the expense of the work’s profounder meanings.”

This is hardly the most outrageous restaging of the ballet, which has been set in Creole Louisiana by Harlem Dance Theater and in a mental ward by Swedish choreographer Mats Ek. Guillem has kept her version of the ballet rooted in a European landscape, but traded in thatched-roof peasant cottages and be-ribboned dirndls for a more timeless look. The Helsinki sets, by Ramn V. Ivars, were criticized for their bombed-out village look. For La Scala, Guillem commissioned Brown--whose ruined-film-studio set she admired in a production of “Richard II” in London last year--to streamline things even more. He traded a heavy, complex set for an easier-to-tour swinging wall and suspended wine bottles from a ceiling to evoke village life during a harvest.

The changes in choreography and storytelling also show Guillem’s desire for more realism. She has replaced one old-fashioned-looking mime routine with a more straightforward enactment of the legend of the wilis--the unquiet spirits of betrayed women--and tried to turn the corps de ballets from extras into characters, including an onstage band to serenade a pas de deux, a village idiot and a drunkard. “I wanted to make sure that everyone had a personality,” she says.

Act 2, in which Giselle is reborn a wili, looks more like a traditional version of the ballet, set in a misty midnight forest haunted by the scorned women. In Guillem’s version, the wilis are less violent avengers than a poignant sisterhood, destroying faithless men in the process of seeking their long-denied pleasure. Brown traded their traditional tutus for a series of subtly varied wedding dresses.

“I’d seen enough of these women looking like zombies,” Guillem says. “I wanted them to be more like sirens, rather than the mean women who [only] want to kill.”

And Guillem wanted Giselle, who is often sent into a caricature of joy and then of madness, to resemble a real girl done in by a broken heart.

“That we could die from love, that we could go mad and learn to forgive, those are extreme emotional situations that we can only live through on the stage,” Guillem says. “If the interpreters aren’t really concerned about showing those things that can turn the audience upside down or make them cry, it will never see more than the superficial side of things.”

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Now 36, Guillem shot to fame in 1984 when she earned the highest rank at Paris Opera Ballet--etoile, “star”--at 19, just five days after having been named a prima ballerina, dancing for the first time as Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake.”

Guillem left Paris Opera Ballet in 1989 seeking a freer artistic life than that highly structured company afforded. She relocated to London and soon found work as a guest star with companies around the world. She now has a part-time contract with London’s Royal Ballet, and spends the rest of the year appearing with La Scala Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the Kirov and others.

Not many ballerinas would have the guts to turn their backs on one of the best jobs in the world, and her departure from Paris cemented her reputation as a diva or a free spirit, depending on who was passing judgment.

“I could never be forced to do things that were against my nature,” she says simply. “I had to follow my instincts. I wasn’t always very obedient.”

That independent-mindedness may have aided Guillem’s leap to directing and choreography. She says it has always seemed natural to seek out justification for each gesture, that she has always conspired with her partners to create complete lives for her characters. “There aren’t many dancers who ask questions, but I didn’t know how else to do it,” she says.

If Guillem the choreographer had a decisive artistic plan for how the story would play out, Guillem the star ballerina tried hard not to impose her personal interpretation on the dancers, especially the women dancing Giselle. “I try to give them a vision of the character, to give them several choices within the framework,” she says. “I tell them: Even if it’s not how I would do it, make me understand what you are saying.”

In rehearsal, she makes an effort to speak to the dancers in an Italian she has learned largely from Snoopy books (“J’adore Charlie Brown!” she says), showing no signs of the diva or the dictator.

Says Gilda Gelati, 33, who will dance the role of Giselle on Saturday afternoon at OCPAC: “To me, she is the greatest living dancer. I said, ‘How can I practice with her watching me?’ But she is very generous. She said, ‘I’ll give you the steps, but you do what you feel.’ ”

Looking embarrassed at the suggestion that the dancers were intimidated by her reputation, Guillem says: “I think I was more scared than they were. I never had a company in my hands. I didn’t know how I’d react or if I’d be capable of explaining what I wanted. If I would be too hard or too lax.”

Guillem says that like many performers, she is at ease in front of thousands and shy in person. But she says she pushed herself to overcome that timidity, and talks with great enthusiasm about the “Giselle” process.

“I love working with people,” she says, “not against them. I was there at all the rehearsals until 7 every night and then I worked with my assistant until midnight. I have a really hard time when I see dancers, with the luck to have a fabulous job with so much opportunity, who don’t give it their all. When I go on stage I try to give everything. And when I try and put something on stage for the public it’s the same.”

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When Guillem came out on the La Scala stage opening night, the crowd cheered. “I was very nervous,” she said the next day, taking a drag on a cigarette. “From the moment the evening began, I had no more control. We spent weeks and weeks on the details and the rhythm so that they would seem natural. I’ve never worked like that. And last night I understood why I’d done it.”

Nevertheless, Guillem says it might be awhile before she takes a chunk of precious time away from dancing to choreograph again. “I dance because it gives me pleasure,” she says. “If I had done it simply out of ambition, there would be no interest for me, and it would bore the public. It would take all the pleasure away. And I look for pleasure in the things I do. I’ve always said the second I don’t find it, I’ll stop.”

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“Giselle,” La Scala Ballet, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. $20-$80. (714) 556-ARTS.