Doug Fullington and Marian Smith were leading contributors. After the premiere of the Pacific Northwest Ballet production, I began to put questions to Fullington and Smith, the two historians involved in that staging. In July 2016, I convened a three-day seminar on Giselle at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 2022 is bringing us a third: Ratmansky’s new production for the United Ukrainian Ballet. 20 brought us the most historically informed two productions of Giselle for many decades: the Pacific Northwest staging of 2011 (Peter Boal, working with Marian Smith and Doug Fullington) and the Bolshoi one of 2019 (the work of Alexei Ratmansky). This doesn’t make me an expert - but it does help me to know many of the questions to ask about it. My own experience of Giselle, amassed from observing performances by many companies, goes back to 1975. What’s left of the 1841 Giselle ? What kind of authenticity or rightness should we ascribe to the passages we’ve loved in recent performances? It’s worth investigating this ballet’s histories. Within two or three years of its world premiere, it was presented in three-act and four-act versions. Some of this ballet’s most famous features were added in the second half of the nineteenth century, others in the second half of the twentieth. Is this, however, because it’s been changed and changed again? The ballet Giselle has retained its fascination for amost a hundred and eighty years. Questions 1-24: Giselle’s sources and context.
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