"Giselle"Silicon Valley Ballet
San Jose Center for the Performing Arts
San Jose, CA
October 18, 2015
by Rita Felciano
copyright ©2015 by Rita Felciano
Silicon Valley Ballet, the moniker under which the former Ballet San Jose is beginning a new life, has made an honorable start with the American premiere of Alicia Alonso’s “Giselle.” According to the program notes, Alonso first choreographed the ballet in 1972 for the Paris Opera but it’s the version she set on the Ballet Nacional de Cuba that has nourished generations of Cuban dancers; current SVB Artistic Director José Manuel Carreño being among the more prominent.
Alexsandra Meijer as Giselle, Karen Gabay as Berthe in "Giselle"
Photo © Alejandro Gomez
Other elaborations – Giselle being torn between her love and her duty; the villagers attempting to assist her during her agony deepened the narrative’s dimensions. I am not sure, however, whether the substitution of the pas de dix (for six women and four men) was an improvement over the pas de deux. It demanded an inordinate amount of attention, slowing down the balletic thrust. Though somewhat unevenly performed it did show Ihosvany Rodriguez and Akira Takahashi’s excellently controlled elevations. At the end of the first act, having the dead Giselle (Alexsandra Meijer) as a pietà with her head in her mother’s lap (a fine Karen Gabay), however, jarred the suspension of disbelief.
Meijer's danced Giselle with a lovely buoyancy to her phrasing; her turns nicely timed and the hops even and secure. Still her characterization felt somewhat studied, as if put on from the outside. It, probably, didn’t help that Bauer, a tall, long-limbed Albrecht, impressed more with his imperiousness than with his courting. (Bauer just joined the company, after a four-year stint with Oregon Ballet and a previous eight years in the corps of SFB. He stepped into the part at the last minute when the scheduled Yoel Carreño was prevented from guesting with SVB). José Carreño played a complex Hilarion from a character dancer's perspective with a trajectory that went from shyness to confusion and fury to indomitable rage. Yet at the end of act one, he was sobbing bitterly.
Meijer’s second act Giselle brought out the best in her. Soft, ethereal and yielding, she floated through the part, with delicate yet secure balances reaching again and again towards Albrecht. Bauer proved a solicitous, cleanly dancing but somewhat bland partner. Amy Marie Briones steely-eyed Myrtha opened those penchées as if pulling them out of the ground. Briones is not the tall dancer Myrtha often is, but she commanded the requisite authority with sharp and decisive dancing. When she slightly softened, her Wilis responded in kind. As Myrtha's less severe assistants, Jing Zhang and Cindy Huang delivered their short solos with aplomb.
I saw the last of this season’s four performances and the strain on the Wilis showed. Even though there were some rough spots in terms of the much-vaunted unisons, these dancers performed well. With beautifully rounded arms that closed above the head, and those soft, sometimes almost padding feet, they flitted around in disciplined formations. In attack mode, they lowered a slightly forward tilting torsos into a 45 degree angle which turned them into something not unlike battering rams. No wonder Carreño’s desperately leaping Hilarion seemed to drown even before being pushed into the abyss.
Gianni Quaranta’s sets—acquired from Boston Ballet some years ago—with its odd version of thatched roofs but a surplus of flower garlands, looked more at home in Naples than in the Rhineland. The music, unfortunately, was taped. Let’s hope that SVB gets on its feet and that they bring this quite wonderful “Giselle” back. With live music, please.