The Royal Ballet’s International Stars Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg Dancing in Sir Peter Wright’s Production of Giselle at the Sarasota Opera House, November 27-29.

[Sarasota, FL – October 27, 2009] The Sarasota Ballet launches its 2009-2010 season with performances of Sir Peter Wright’s Giselle, November 27-29, 2009 in the Sarasota Opera House featuring internationally renowned stars of The Royal Ballet, Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg. Sharing the roles in alternating shows will be Sarasota Ballet Principals Victoria Hulland and Octavio Martin. The production is being staged by Margaret Barbieri, a former principal of The Royal Ballet who has danced the title role in Sir Peter Wright’s Giselle more than any other ballerina since the production premiered in 1966.

Choreography: Marius Petipa (after Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot)
Staging: Sir Peter Wright’s production staged by Margaret Barbieri
Music: Adolphe Adam
Libretto: Théophile Gautier, Jean Coralli & Vernoy de St Georges

Premiered 28 June 1841 at Théatre de l’Académie Royale de Musique, Paris and 1884 Maryinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. Sir Peter Wright’s production of Giselle premiered in Stuttgart in 1966 but had its London premiere at Covent Garden in 1968, by Royal Ballet Touring Company.

The crowning achievement of the Romantic ballet and an enduringly central part of the repertoire, Giselle perfectly exemplifies how ballet is a living tradition, taught, preserved, adapted and handed down, from generation to generation. Sir Peter Wright’s internationally-acclaimed staging is probably the definitive and most authentic production available.

Giselle, originally staged with great success in 1841 as a vehicle for the star Carlotta Grisi, and was choreographed by Jules Perrot and Jean Coralli, and went on to triumph in London, St Petersburg and Vienna (1842), Berlin and Milan (1843), and Boston (1846), but passed out of the Paris Opéra repertoire in 1868. In 1884 Marius Petipa, who essentially took the French repertoire to Russia with him, restaged Giselle at the Imperial (Maryinsky or Kirov) Theatre, making his own changes, additions and omissions, as he did again in 1899 and for Anna Pavlova in 1903. Petipa’s version was notated and forms the basis for subsequent revivals, although most Western productions are based on the Ballets Russes 1910 staging for their second Paris season.

Count Albrecht of Silesia, in disguise as the peasant Loys, romances a young and sensitive village girl, Giselle, who falls completely in love with him and rejects her jealous admirer Hilarion, a village hunter, despite his suspicions about her new beau and her mother Berthe’s concern that the girl is over-exerting her delicately-balanced emotions. Their alarm is justified with the arrival of an aristocratic hunting party including Bathilde, the Count’s beautiful and gracious fiancée, whose kindness to Giselle is brutally followed by Hilarion’s revelation of Loys as the Count. The despairing, overwrought girl sees the sword on the ground and in her madness, she stabs herself and dies.

Act Two takes place near Giselle’s forest grave, haunted by the Wilis and their Queen, Myrtha, the ghosts of jilted brides who revenge themselves by dancing to death any man they meet. Both her suitors visit Giselle’s grave. Hilarion falls victim to the Wilis, but when Albrecht is about to suffer the same fate, the spirit of Giselle intervenes and saves him from Myrtha’s merciless revenge, and the ballet ends with Giselle’s spirit finding peace by rejecting the Wilis and forgiving Albrecht.

DESTINATION

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