Playing Giselle is a dream come true for dancer

By Kristen Peterson

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Racheal Hummel-Nole is a bit obsessed with the ballet “Giselle.” Or, as she says, “a little freakish.”

She’s consumed volumes of literature on the choreography, the dancers, the history and the music. She’s studied photos, watched videos, researched performances, pondered various interpretations of Albrecht’s maliciousness and trekked to performances good and bad.

Any company. Any version. That includes Sylvie Guillem’s very unconventional restaging of “Giselle” and a drive to San Francisco this spring to see the San Francisco Ballet’s revival.

“I would crawl through mud to see ‘Giselle,’ ” Hummel-Nole says.

And that’s just to be in the audience.

On Saturday, the principal dancer with Nevada Ballet Theatre performs the role of Giselle in the company’s staging of the Jean Corrali and Jules Perrot version of the ballet.

Mythical and tragic, the Romantic ballet is revered by audiences and companies. For dancers, the role of “Giselle” is coveted.

“It’s a very juicy role to play,” says Hummel-Nole, 27, who performs the Saturday matinee. “Some people want to climb a mountain; I just want to be Giselle. It’s my bucket list. I love tragedy.”

Giselle embodies two characters in the two-act ballet conceived by French poet Theophile Gautier and set to the music of Adolphe Adam.

At first, she’s a naive and poor youth who falls for Albrecht, a nobleman disguised as a peasant. Though betrothed to a princess, he lures her, deceives her and breaks her heart. The spurned lover goes insane, dies and is initiated into the Wilis, a coven of ghostly vampires. All jilted maidens who died before their wedding nights, the Wilis take revenge on their lovers by forcing them to dance to their death.

And she is the ghostly Wili who saves Albrecht through her love and forgiveness. The tragic story of deception is of Shakespearean proportions, but Shakespeare had words. Giselle, who is two characters in one ballet, must pantomime her way through nearly every thought and act, more so than in other ballets.

Hummel-Nole still hears the voice of Gelsie Kirkland, with whom she studied “Giselle” during a summer intensive at age 14.

Hummel-Nole had seen the ballet for the first time two years earlier: “I loved it, didn’t know what I was loving yet, but it was just so beautiful.”