Nevada Ballet sparkles, haunts

By Joe Brown

Monday, Oct. 20, 2008 | 2 a.m.

With its harvest-time setting and eerie legend, “Giselle” is a perfect choice of ballet for the approach of Halloween. And the longtime audience favorite made a sterling season opener for Nevada Ballet Theatre.

It was also an eye-opener: Las Vegas’ professional ballet troupe is clearly growing by, well, leaps and bounds — in confidence, authority and artistry.

At Friday night’s opening performance at UNLV’s Judy Bayley Theatre, the dancers offered an altogether splendid production, danced with precision, tempered with grace, and conjured stage pictures which lingered in the mind’s eye long after the well-deserved fifth curtain call.

Performed by the world’s great companies for more than 150 years, “Giselle” is a story ballet about a naive peasant girl who is suddenly swept off her feet by a dashing stranger. When Giselle’s erstwhile beau, the village huntsman Hilarion, jealously reveals the stranger’s real identity (it’s not so bad, he’s Count Albrecht, a wealthy nobleman, but he’s slumming and merely toying with her), she dances herself into madness and death. In Act Two, Giselle has joined the company of ghostly jilted girls called the Wilis, who haunt the forest from dusk till dawn. When the heartbroken Albrecht appears in the woods to mourn her, Giselle pleads with the frosty Queen of the Wilis to join him or to spare his life.

The nonsensical story is just a slight sketch, a framing device for a series of lovely tableaux vivants set in an autumn-hued pastoral hamlet in view of a distant castle. The first act requires nearly as much acting as dancing, which Nevada Ballet carried off with a light and humorous touch. The main requirement of the tale is to set up the ballet’s principals to showcase their expressive and time-honored moves.

Rebecca Brimhall danced the role of Giselle on Friday night and she was extraordinary, playing the coy flirting and rosy-cheeked joy of the giddy peasant girl, and the chilling transition when the character loses her grip on reality. Brimhall was partnered by Grigori Arakelyan, and it’s hard to imagine a more charming or impressively athletic prince. Kyudong Kwak was admirably sly and nimble as Hilarion, who rats out Albrecht and inadvertently destroys his beloved Giselle.

After the principals are introduced and story and setting is established, much of the first act is occupied by a centerpiece of folk-dance inspired pas de deux performed by a pair of peasants for the entertainment of visiting royals and their fellow villagers. The segment was heartily danced on Friday by corps member Edilsa Armendariz and soloist Jared Hunt, and after Hunt landed a particularly complex and difficult leap, a man in the audience was moved to shout as if he was watching an Olympic event. His enthusiasm seemed to galvanize both the dancers and the audience.

The first act is diverting and picturesque, and its hour passed swiftly.

But the haunted, haunting Act Two, set in a dusky forest which looked as if painted by Maxfield Parrish, is where the NBT dancers really began to shine. In fact, they glowed.

Clutching a mass of white lilies, the grieving Albrecht arrives in the woods, and at first doesn’t see the wispy apparitions surrounding him. Deathly pale, eyes downcast, veiled in wisps of white tulle, lit in wan hues of icy blue, the Wilis are a night-dwelling gang of bereft brides. Arrayed in solemn rows or spectral circles, the toe-dancing corps de ballet achieved weightlessness as they floated amid the forest clearing, and the haunting image they conjured made even more memorable by a simple but stunning effect, in which the Wilis’ white veils vanished all at once.

The Wilis are presided over by Myrtha, the frosty and bitter Queen of the Wilis, danced on Friday by Cathy Colbert, who brought a haunting hauteur and supernatural expertise to the role. When Giselle — the new girl among the Wilis — rematerializes, she and Albrecht share a final, yearning, hopeless dance, and when Arakelyan lifted her, Brimhall appeared entirely otherworldly, ethereal and utterly incorporeal. Just spectacular.

Performed to a recording of Adolphe Adam’s score, with evocative sets and costumes provided by the Louisville Ballet, “Giselle” was staged by James Canfield, the interim artistic director of Nevada Ballet Theatre, and it was immediately apparent that he has been intensely drilling his dancers in stage discipline and attention to nuance. Working with the choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, Canfield clearly worked intensively with the female principals not only in execution of steps and sequences, but in gorgeous and expressive arm movements. His efforts were rewarded by strong dancing by the male principals, and particularly impressive work by the corps.

“Giselle” was performed four times over the weekend, with three casts of principals in the lead roles of Giselle and Count Albrecht, and two casts for Hilarion and Myrtha. I truly wish I could have seen them all.