Giselle

Dada Masilo continues to reinvent the classical repertoire. After her stunning versions of Swan Lake or Carmen, the gifted choreographer from Johannesburg revisits this time Giselle, one of the great romantic ballets of the nineteenth century. In the original libretto, written by Théophile Gautier, a young peasant girl perishes at the betrayal of her lover, a disguised aristocrat, but returns from the dead to protect him from the vengeful anger of the Wilis, ghosts of abandoned women. No pardon at Dada Masilo: with traditional African spirits, his Giselle will suffer grief and revenge, here synonymous with liberation. African percussions and vocals come to color the original score of Adolphe Adam, reviewed by the South African composer Philip Miller. A rereading anchored in the present, theatrical and percussive time.

Source: Maison de la Danse de Lyon

First performed at the Paris Opéra on 28 June 1841 as a two-act “ballet-pantomime” and hailed by ballet historians as the oldest surviving exampl of a ballet that owes its origins to the work of a global collective. As the archetypal Romantic ballet, Giselle revolves aroun the traditional motif of the love that triumphs over death, a motif that can be traced back to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and that was to culminate in the later 19th century in the music dramas of Wagner. The plot, in outline, is as follows. Giselle is an innocent and naïve young girl from the country.

Sources : livret ARTHAUS Musik