Choreographer: Akram Khan
Nearly a decade after its premiere, Akram Khan’s Giselle remains one of the most viscerally affecting works in the contemporary ballet repertoire. It has an extraordinary capacity to unsettle, confront, and overwhelm, forcing the audience to feel, rather than merely observe.
Tim Yip’s design establishes an Orwellian environment of containment and control. A vast, shifting wall dominates the stage, dictating movement, corralling bodies, and enforcing hierarchy. Far from framing the action, it constrains it, an oppressive system from which there is no escape.
Vincenzo Lamagna’s score intensifies that pressure. Fracturing and distorting Adolphe Adam’s original music, the soundscape rejects Romantic lyricism in favour of relentless rhythm and bass-heavy force. At times, the music seems to shake the auditorium itself, recalling the suffocating sonic environments of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Arrival, where sound functions less as accompaniment than as an inescapable presence.
Khan’s choreography subjects classical ballet technique to sustained stress. Verticality collapses into grounded, percussive movement; lightness gives way to resistance and torque. The effect is jarring and transformative, comparable to the first encounter with Bob Fosse’s choreography: a moment when a familiar form is made suddenly strange, its internal grammar rewritten.
At the centre of the production, Emily Suzuki’s Giselle is defined by defiance rather than fragility. Her movement carries an elegance that appears to defy physics, sustained even as the world closes in around her. This is a Giselle defined by endurance rather than defeat, her collapse the inevitable consequence of prolonged pressure rather than emotional weakness. The interpretation lends the character dignity and strength.
Ken Saruhashi delivers an exceptional performance as Hilarion. No moral counterweight to the ruling class, this Hilarion is a collaborator, aligning himself with power in order to dominate his peers, and revolting only when his perceived status and privilege are stripped away. Saruhashi’s physicality gives this moral corrosion disturbing clarity, his anger rooted not in justice but entitlement.
In Act Two, the spirits of the workers morph into a ruthless collective, the Wilis, their authority absolute and chilling. Emma Hawes’s Myrtha is haunting, exerting absolute command. Forgiveness, when it comes, is stripped of sentimentality, a radical act in a world otherwise governed by cruelty and inevitability.
Design elements are largely performative, serving to delineate class and power without distracting from the movement, with perhaps one exception, but even that serves as a reminder of the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, the living and the barely alive. Elsewhere, the repeated use of bamboo poles proves quietly potent, shifting between tools of labour, weapons of control, and something more intimate, binding bodies to the systems that sustain and destroy them.
This Giselle confronts its audience with a world of sustained oppression and moral endurance, leaving its aftershocks long after the final image fades. As a statement of what narrative ballet can achieve, it is an extraordinary work.
Runs until 18 January 2025 “
