Have you seen Giselle? It's one of those ballets one always hears of, but I had never seen it before the girls' ballet studio put it on this year. The story is a bit horrifying, I must say! Giselle is betrayed in love, dies of a broken heart, and then after her death, she (for some reason??!) saves her faithless lover, barely, from being danced to death by the ghostly wilis in the forest! And whom do you suppose were two of those vengeful wilis? Daisy and Junie, that's who. Tsk tsk!
Even though I didn't think I'd seen Giselle or the wilis before, I was somehow familiar with their signature step, this strange flattened arabesque that the wilis do while hopping across the stage (arabesque chugs, they call them). You will perhaps be shocked to hear that this move "signifies their murderous intentions"! Yes! They are quite evil! Not a role I can condone at all.
But let us leave this ghastly scene and go back to earlier in the ballet.
Thank goodness Goldie remains sweet and innocent. A charming village lass. (I suppose Daisy is one too. But not for long!)
Here is one of their pretty peasant dances
Junie had a part in the pas de trois and also a long solo!
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Watch her, if you'd like! She is so good! (link: https://youtu.be/RNuIESzD2Rs)
I like this picture of Junie and Brynn just standing casually in midair
Such high leaps!
In the last few performances, someone (another mother, I'm afraid😬) has been VERY ZEALOUS about the costumes—excessively zealous, we might say—not wanting the dancers to so much as set FOOT in the lobby while wearing them, and since they also didn't have any dress rehearsals to speak of (they had them, but no one dressed for them)—it was very difficult getting pictures of Daisy and Junie in costume. We had to sneak out the back door like thieves in the night! (DO thieves in the night sneak out the back door? They probably have to sneak IN the back door first, but then surely they must then sneak back out again?) But I'm glad we did it because their costumes were very pretty and they wanted a record of them!
The wilis do this low, cradling-arm pose a lot too, and we read somewhere that it might represent the babies they will never have.😢
It doesn't excuse their murderous intentions, though!
The Second Act of Giselle looks really spooky and cool. The backdrop is all black and the wilis, with the spotlights on them, really do look like glowing ghosts against it.
The girls have these long veils on at the beginning of the Act. They tied fishing line to the tops of the veils and then at a certain moment, people backstage pulled on the fishing line and all the veils just whisked off their heads and disappeared behind the curtains. It was really cool to watch!
(Like this)
It was so dark, and their dresses were so white, I had a hard time even taking pictures of them.
Here are those murderously flat arabesques. They're so interesting to watch. So distinctive. And the girls have to do it without crashing into the lines of other dancers going the opposite way!
Sometimes their murderous intentions are emphasized by a red light from below. Scary! And they do not smile. Never. It wouldn't be fitting for such murderous young ladies.
Poor Hilarion pleads with the queen of the wilis for his life. But she refuses. She is heartless. They're all heartless. (Except Giselle, of course. She manages to save her own [unfaithful!] lover, Albrecht, when he shows up later. But Hilarion has no such luck.)
The queen of the wilis dooms him to dance until he dies!
And then he is forced to do so, hemmed in on every side by the unrelenting wilis!
Clementine wore her tutu to the ballet and enjoyed it very much! I can only imagine what valuable life lessons she was learning from the story.
She was definitely paying attention, as evidenced by this dance she did for me me later the next day!
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