The Beautiful Damned

Joburg Ballet's rendition of Giselle is the third performance of this magnificent ballet that I have watched; but this is the first time I have left the theatre feeling as if it is my own heart that has broken.

In case you don't know the story, Giselle is a village girl so fair and lovely she attracts the attention of both a count and a poor woodsman. The count pretends to be of lowly birth so that he can court Giselle, and she falls in love with him, little suspecting his nobility or that he is, in fact, already betrothed. The huntsman outs him, however, and the resulting shock slays Giselle. The next time we see her, she has joined a band of ghosts called the Wilis - girls who were jilted before their wedding day. They wreak their revenge by forcing any man they encounter to dance until his death. This is the fate that befalls the huntsman, but when the Wilis turn their fury on the count, Giselle protects him.

So far, so twee. The storyline is always secondary in a ballet, isn't it? You watch more to marvel at the amazing feats the human body is capable of accomplishing. Like most people, that's what I love about ballet - the stark dichotomy of floating grace and the resolute discipline it takes to create this illusion. This evening, though, I realised (after many years of  watching ballet) that, just as water has three forms, so too does the ballerina's steel: it has the ability to transmute from mental rigour to physical beauty, and then pure, raw emotion.

Watching the doomed ghost girls, I was, of course, transfixed by timing and placement so perfect it would have soothed any acute obsessive compulsive - but, more than that, I found myself wondering what had caused their molten passion to turn into diamond hard vengeance. Watching the dance between the two main characters reminded me of the very first time your heart knows and understands absence.

And that made me think about why it is we have things like ballet - because, in a world like ours, it;s easy to dismiss these tutus as frothy and frivolous. But they're not - they have the ability to make us feel connected and human. And there's little more serious than that.

Giselle runs at the Joburg Theatre until 17 April.
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