✦ Origins ✦
This is not the 1841 Romantic-era Giselle of Adolphe Adam, Jean Coralli, and Jules Perrot - the ballet of Rhineland vineyards and vengeful spirit-brides covered elsewhere as a classical work. This is Mats Ek's 1982 Giselle, made for Cullberg Ballet, the Swedish company his mother Birgit Cullberg had founded in 1967 and which he was about to take over as sole artistic director. It is a standalone reinvention built on top of the original story and score rather than a staging or restaging of it, and it is generally treated as one of the two or three most consequential ballet reinterpretations of the 20th century.
Ek kept Adolphe Adam's music essentially intact but used it against itself, reassigning familiar leitmotifs to different characters and moments than the ones they originally scored - a way of signaling, from the pit, that the audience's expectations were about to be taken apart along with the story. The title role was created on and for Ana Laguna, Ek's wife and closest collaborator, whose performance in the part - later captured on film and broadcast internationally - became one of the most celebrated interpretations in the work's history and helped carry the production to more than two dozen countries.
What Makes It Distinct
Act one keeps the shape of the original - a village, a young woman, a visiting nobleman courting her under false pretenses - but recasts Giselle as an already fragile, emotionally exposed outsider rather than a delicate ingénue, so that Albrecht's betrayal does not introduce madness into an otherwise stable life so much as break something that was already close to breaking. The traditional mad scene survives in spirit but not in its familiar choreographic shape: Ek's Giselle does not mime grief in recognizable gestures so much as physically collapse, and that collapse is what commits her to an institution rather than a grave.
Act two is where the reinvention is most total. The moonlit forest of Wilis is replaced by a mental hospital ward, and the Wilis themselves become fellow patients dressed in institutional white; Myrtha, their implacable supernatural queen in the original, becomes the ward's supervising nurse, an authority figure stripped of magic but not of menace. Pointe work and the ethereal, gravity-defying vocabulary the Wilis are known for are abandoned almost entirely in favor of grounded, often barefoot, flexed-foot movement, trading the original's images of weightlessness for images of confinement and institutional control. The ending departs from the traditional redemption arc as well: rather than being forgiven and released by a dawn-breaking Giselle who has interceded on his behalf, Ek's Albrecht is left to reckon with what he has done in the plainest terms, and the piece resolves through an uneasy reconciliation between Albrecht and Hilarion - the two men who both loved Giselle and both, in the end, lose her - rather than through supernatural mercy.
Reception & Legacy
Ek's Giselle was, by the standards of story-ballet revivals, a sensation: it toured internationally for years, was filmed for television, and made Ana Laguna's performance in the title role famous well beyond Sweden. More importantly, it established a working template - keep the score, keep enough of the plot to stay legible, replace everything else with a specific, unsentimental psychological reading - that Ek reused on Swan Lake in 1987 and Carmen in 1992, and that other choreographers have since applied to other 19th-century warhorses. Decades on, it remains in the active repertory of companies worldwide and is routinely taught and discussed as the reference point for what a serious, fully reimagined restaging of a Romantic ballet can look like, rather than a novelty version of the original.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Mats Ek.