The New Yorker Radio Hour - “Giselle,” and What to Do with the Problematic Past – Part II

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

When the renowned choreographer Akram Khan was commissioned to update the classic “Giselle” for the English National Ballet, he couldn’t simply put new steps to a Romantic-era plot. Beautiful as it is, “Giselle” has a view of ideal womanhood that is insupportable in our century—and it didn’t reflect the women he knew.  In Khan’s 2016 “Giselle,” the title character doesn’t chastely expire from a broken heart; she is a strong woman victimized by more powerful men.  The story still culminates in an act of forgiveness, but in a way that resonates with the era of #MeToo. Vincenzo Lamagna composed the production’s new score. The producer Ngofeen Mputubwele describes the production as not simply a great modern ballet but a model for how to reimagine a story that doesn’t work anymore. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Gauphan, and Coutubewelle. I'm hosting today's episode. Is it possible to take an old story and make it new? Anyone who listens to music or watches TV or reads novels has some story they love that just doesn't fly today in some way or another. One of those works for me is my favorite ballet, Giselle.

It is in the 1840s when Europe is in the romantic era. You know, romantic era gives us Beethoven and Verdi and like, it's all about emotion and passion. And Giselle comes on as this like, it's the romantic ballet. It's got ghosts and death and nature, pastoral and the soul. supernatural and like all these elements. And it influences the shows like the Nutcracker and Swan Lake that we all think of when we think of ballet. Okay, Giselle, here's the basic story. We start the show with the peasants.

This peasant girl, Giselle, she meets this peasant boy, Albrecht. And she's like, ah, he's cute. You know, meet cute, fall in love, great. Actually, except... Turns out, Albrecht is not a peasant. He is a noble in disguise. And he's already got a fiancé back home. And then the fiancé and her peers show up and are like, what are you doing?

You're not one of these people. And then Giselle's like, you lied! And she dies of a broken heart. She goes crazy and dies of a broken heart. That's Giselle Act 1. It's two acts. Act 1. Back to our betrayer, Albrecht, peasant slash not peasant boy, goes into the forest where Giselle's body has been buried.

And Giselle is actually a ghost now, and she lives in this forest full of ghost women in white dresses. They're called willies, women who died of betrayal. And so now in death, they get their vengeance. If any man comes into their forest, they will kill that man. And they will kill the man by dancing him to death, making him dance until he dies. So, Giselle is one of these new willies, and the queen of the willies sees Albrecht, our dirtbag guy. And she's like, kill him, kill him. Everyone shows up, we're like, we're going to kill him.

And then Giselle, in this really dramatic moment, is like, no, you can't kill him. I'm not going to let you kill him. And so she saves him. What she does is she holds off the willies until daybreak when it's safe. The moral of the story, forgiveness can overcome the worst betrayal. Little girls are still taught to aspire to the balletic ideal. And Giselle is one of the foundational heroines. So just like with a Barbie doll where you can look at it at a particular time

and see what was valued in girls and women. In the heroine, Giselle, you get a statement of the female ideal. She's pale, unspoken, she's white, she's delicate and fragile, she's young, she's pure or chaste. The most important thing in her life is her love for a man, so much so that when she loses it,

she collapses, goes insane, and dies. And she puts herself in harm's way for him to protect her man. You can see where that might clash with some of our values today. That's where one of the world's leading choreographers comes in. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm Akram Khan. I'm a choreographer and primarily a dancer.

I'm a storyteller. And the only listener that I care about is me. Akram Khan is a powerhouse in contemporary dance. His movement is striking and incorporates, Indian classical dance into the choreography. In 2016, Akram gets the same call from multiple ballet companies. There were four artistic directors from four different ballet companies in the same month. Everyone wants to know, would you please do a new version of Jazeel for us?

That's when things started to get interesting. This is the composer of Inchenso La Mania, Akram's longtime collaborator. I knew that Akram couldn't work just with the original score. And he called me in to mess it up. La Manja and Khan studied the original score by Adolf Adon and decided to pull out some bars that really moved them, which in the end was a small percentage of the original music. And they built from there. I'm going to show you three examples of how they brought Giselle from the 1840s up to date. First, the beginning.

I was consciously thinking, like, how are we starting this? and the beginning and the end of a show is incredibly difficult. Now, I can imagine then in 1840, you go to a theater and there's a lot of audience in there, they're all loud, and they're waiting for the show to start. You need to grab their attention. And in that sense, that opening to me says, boom, we are starting, you've got to listen.

Plus, the music wasn't amplified. You have to go for it. To me, if I amplify it, I have a whole palette that I can access, meaning that I can play much quieter. So my grabbing the attention of we are starting here is in this instance the opposite of what the original score does, because we start very quiet. The very first hit that opens the show is a taiko drum, which is a Japanese drum that I don't know how old it is, but it's probably. a few hundred years old. It's something very, very old that it's creating a potential imagery of, oh, this is now, this is industrial. Two, there is a big change that happens at the end of Act 1, which is the death of Giselle.

There was a tiny fragment, which was an harmonic progression that I found that I absolutely loved. I could hear it, played in a completely different way in my head, arranged in a completely different way in my head. But I told Darkram, I'm like, listen, this is very risky, but I think we shouldn't move from these four chords. I had this obsession with this idea of literally a repetition of the same progression that just builds and builds and build. But in a very mantra kind of way. almost wanted the music to disappear. So that you're sitting there, you're almost forgetting that the music is happening. And here's how it plays out on stage.

At the heart of Giselle, Akram saw a story of inequality. So in this new production of Giselle, the peasants are now migrant workers in a garment factory. The nobles are now wealthy landlords who own all the property. Albrecht is one of the landlords. he disguises himself as a migrant worker to go hook up with one of the migrants, Giselle. She falls in love with Albrecht, and when Albrecht's deception is revealed, the head landowner of the ruling class has her executed. The scene is incredible.

Visually what's happening on stage is incredible, but the intention behind is probably even more powerful than that. It's this idea of dying, dying out of desperation. Giselle is not this weak, frail woman who, like, her heart just collapses when she finds out she's been betrayed. She very clearly is killed against her will. The physical body language is the body language of domestic violence and just like you're beating this woman and she's trying to resist and you see her like fighting the guy off but she can't fight him off and then he's. she dies. Three, the willies.

Those ethereal silfs dressed in white who Giselle joins after death. In this new production, they're ferocious specters. And for Akram Khan, they conjure a memory from his own life.

Who you are is shaped by your childhood. It really is. It's not your adulthood. It's your childhood. My mom was fierce. Fighting my father and finding the right to work. I remember seeing Kali in my mother.

Kali is rage. You know, the power, sorry, it's a Hindu goddess with a tongue out. You know, it's very powerful. And I remember seeing that in my mother, many times against my father, who wouldn't let me dance? I remember my mother said, no, who says, we cannot do this?

Who says you're not allowed to do this? It was my mother, my mother, who was the weather willies, with a wild hair. They were the right ones. They were mistreated. They were betrayed. Why would I make them pretty?

That's me trying to control the view of a woman. And in this world, we fear women if we cannot control them. When the willies come and say, kill this man who betrayed you, she's like, what she does is she looks at the queen of the willies. and she's like, we're not doing it this way. He's going to stay alive, and you and I are going back into the forest. And that man, whom I love,

is going to have to live with the consequences of what he did. Albrecht, he goes back to his nobleman people, but they actually cast him out. And so, although he loves her and she loved him, he ends up alone. Khan reinvigorates this old dusty ballet, which is pretty and at its best very beautiful, and he makes it alive and scary and real. And at a moment when so many people are talking about forgiveness,

when it comes to Me Too or even respirations, this show clarifies what forgiveness means. It says it's legit, it is powerful. and that it doesn't erase the consequences of the harm. Akram also gives some insight into how to change traditions. To really change an old tradition, you need to think about it like dressing a turkey. You take the tradition, you break its neck, you pull out all the guts, put them in a little bag, and then with what's left, you ask, how do we want to prepare this bird? I come from Indian classical training.

Classical ballet and classical Indian dance, They share similar things. One of those things is familiarity. This is my parameter. You do not go past this boundary. Then it becomes not classical. It's very clear boundaries. And those boundaries are passed down generation by generation.

The stories we've heard in this episode are driven in part by rage. It's painful when you're, realize you need to change. But it's infuriating when the people around you impede that change from happening. And when by some miracle change finally happens, it's moving. For me, this new version of Giselle isn't just a great ballet. It's a model for how to reimagine a story that doesn't quite work anymore. how deep you have to go to make it new.

And I keep coming back to something that Akram Khan told me in our conversation. People change in four different seasons, that's why I always say, or for four different reasons. One of them is people change when they hurt enough that they have to. People change because when they see enough that they're inspired to. Third one is when they learn enough that they want to. And the fourth one would be they change when they receive enough. that they are able to. I'm Gophane Putupuele.

Glad I could be with you for this episode. David Remnick will be back next time. From The New Yorker Radio Hour, happy new year. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards.

Original music this week was by Gauphin and Putubuele. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell and Gophane in Putubuele. Along with Adam Howard, Jenny Lawton, Jeffrey Masters, and Max Bolton. And we had assistance from Mike Cutchman, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.