GISELLE / PROGRAM / Garnier / SEPTEMBER / 2025

Description

It begins like a fairy tale: the charming peasant girl Giselle loves a young man who, beneath his rustic attire, turns out to be a duke. Alas! Albrecht - that is his name - cannot marry her because he is already engaged.

Discovering this, Giselle sinks into madness and death. She is taken in by the Wilis, the souls of young girls abandoned by unfaithful lovers. Will she take revenge on Albrecht by luring him to his death, or will love and forgiveness triumph?

First performed in 1841 at the Royal Academy of Music, Jules Perrot and Jean Coralli's ballet - here adapted by Patrice Bart and Eugène Polyakov - ushered in a new aesthetic in the history of Western dance.

Pointe shoes, arabesques and long white tutus conjure up a fantastical, diaphanous universe that has become the very embodiment of Romanticism.