January 1987 Scène de Folie
SCèNE DE FOLIE
As settings go, Giselle’s is the humblest of the great full-length ballets.
Act I brings the audience into a tiny German village during the Middle Ages, where the only pastimes are hunting, dancing, and telling eerie stories about the ghosts of wronged women who make any man foolish enough to cross their path dance himself to death.
But that last won’t become important until Act II.
For the majority of Act I, everyone’s cheerful and keen to celebrate the autumn harvest – young Giselle most of all.
Despite her mother’s entreaties to take it easy and not get carried away with excitement, she keeps unwinding her arms above her head in the mime symbol of dance.
Giselle should listen to her mother: several times in Act I she falters with a hand to her chest, as if she has a heart defect and is at risk of fainting.
But it’s a risk she’s willing to embrace, because whether by herself or with her new boyfriend Albrecht, nothing lights her up more than dancing.
For the first time since becoming a principal, I was able to rehearse with the rest of the company from the outset.
It felt like my soloist days, dancing with Fiona, Jamie, and Charlie all in the same room.
Sander and I would run Act I with them and the rest of the corps from start to end until Nick and Ben were satisfied.
After that, the two of us would go off and work on our Act II scenes while the principals from the other casts did Act I.
‘Pause it there!’ Nick clapped his hands as Sander and I stopped our first pas de deux.
I burned with embarrassment at being corrected in front of thirty other people; everyone knew what he was about to say.
‘I know this is a tricky one, but it only works if you’re in perfect unison: on the same beat, the same breath, the same wavelength.
Sander, you need to go much slower, and Trix, you need to pick it up faster. From the top.’
We’d never had to dance like this before, arms linked while our legs flew out like flames flickering in the wind. It took three tries before we found a speed we could both sustain.
I got my confidence back once we reached the scene where a hunting party of nobles from the nearest castle passes through Giselle’s village in search of sustenance and rest. Starstruck by the noblewoman Bathilde (played by our intimidatingly chic character artist Antoinette Decareaux), Giselle defies her mother’s anxious warnings and dances a solo of dizzying speed, her gentle andante steps whipping themselves into the tight turns of a girl tossing her cares aside.
I was breathless by the time I dropped into the final kneeling position at Antoinette’s feet, but the cheers and claps from the corps covered the sound nicely.
In the last week of our group Act I rehearsals, we went into “the mad scene”. Nick made sure that everyone else knew their positions from start to finish before he brought me into the centre. Before that, I had half an hour with Mariska, trying to soak up as much of her guidance as possible.
‘Think – when is the precise moment she breaks with reality? When is the point of no return?’
‘When Bathilde points to her ring finger, and Giselle realises…’ But Mariska was shaking her head. I tried again. ‘When she collapses?’
‘Before that. Much sooner than that.’
I thought back through all my rehearsals of this sequence alone at home, treading circles into the carpet and probably making my downstairs neighbour believe I really was having some kind of breakdown.
‘When he laughs,’ Mariska said. ‘Albrecht is the love of Giselle’s life, the only one she has allowed to come close. And he brushes her away like she is nothing. She is a joke, a nobody. That is when she breaks.’
She was right. I had been nervous about this scene all morning; now I was amped up.
‘I know it’s hard without the stage and the costumes and all of it, but you must be fearless. The scène de folie cannot be done half-hearted. Forget Nick and Ben and the other dancers. Forget about looking pretty.’
Back in the Pavlova studio, Nick called for silence. ‘All right, everyone, let’s go from Hilarion breaking up the festivities. Lori, give Stephen a few bars please?’
Stephen had been cast as Hilarion, the village hunter who fancies Giselle and resents newcomer Albrecht for monopolising her attention.
Fortunately for him, he makes a discovery that destroys their chance of a happy ending.
Just as Sander and I moved into the centre, on the verge of a kiss, Stephen lowered a prop sword between us, forced us apart, and held it up for all to see.
Care to explain this? He rounded on me, his gestures rough and impassioned. You think he loves you? He doesn’t. He’s no peasant, he’s a member of the nobility. Look at the crest on the sword hilt!
Giselle refuses to believe it. I ran into Sander’s arms and looked up into his face while he led me away from Stephen.
‘But then, out comes the hunting horn,’ Nick narrated from the side.
Two deep notes on the piano stood in for the call to the hunting party, who left the village mere moments earlier.
After a few tense seconds, two more notes: they’re coming back.
Albrecht tries to think of how he’s going to get out of this one.
Giselle isn’t sure what’s going on; she knows only that it’s bad.
Antoinette returned upstage and pointed at Sander. Why are you dressed like that?
Oh, this? Sander did well at conveying suppressed panic. I felt like playing at being poor for a day. A whim, nothing more. A silent laugh, followed by a dutiful kiss of her hand.
And so begins the scène de folie. I ran between Antoinette and Sander, stricken, arms outstretched, pleading for clarity. Antoinette pointed to her ring finger: He is promised to me.
My lip trembled as I pointed at my own ring finger.
But he pledged his love to me! He’s mine, he’s mine, he was meant to be mine!
I grasped at Sander’s face, trying to get him to look me in the eye, but he pushed my hands away.
I stumbled backwards, crossing the stage in a messy pirouette before crumpling next to Noemi, playing Giselle’s mother.
‘Undo her hair while everyone’s reacting to this scandal…’ Nick continued. ‘Yes, that’s good, Noemi, as if you’re cradling her head. Trying to get her on her feet again.’
I skittered upstage, then flinched as I ran into Stephen and turned my face away from everyone, my loose hair a curtain.
Lori pushed into the lower keys, the sound jagged and discordant.
The room was silent, until the hesitant minor notes from Giselle and Albrecht’s earlier courtship scene made a reprisal, their meaning now warped.
I slowly lifted my head, fingertips clamped to my skull, as if I might rip my hair out at the roots.
I imagined my soul retreating behind my eyes so that they moved from person to person like headlights, registering nothing.
I raised a shaky arm high with my index and middle finger pressed together, as Albrecht had done earlier in his pledge of true love.
I forced my arm down again with my other hand and shook my head, throat tightening: But that was a lie.
I made full use of the semi-circle created by the other dancers, all of whom were gradually edging away from my erratic Giselle.
I approached Noemi with unfocused eyes, turned to my friends, pulled away from Sander when he tried to take my hands.
Then my foot knocked against the prop sword, still on the floor, its blade gleaming under the ceiling lights.
Lori’s piano accompaniment descended into the darkest bass notes, signalling that this pastoral romance had crossed over into full-blown horror.
Before anyone could stop me, I grabbed the sword by the blade and traced a frenzied circle on the floor, like a witch casting a spell.
The dancers on the left reached for it, then the dancers on the right, but I was unstoppable: grinning, I poised the tip of the sword against my sternum, raised the hilt high, and ran downstage, silently cackling even as Stephen reached for it.
I bent double with the imagined force of a sword piercing bone and muscle, the heart that was already weak before Albrecht broke it.
Classical ballet and freestyling rarely mix.
Even in an age of video recordings, the only way choreography can be preserved is by one person teaching it to another, encoding it in their body, hoping that it will survive even after the dancer for whom it was created is gone.
So it is a special thing – a daunting thing – to be not only allowed but encouraged to move through Giselle’s scène de folie guided mainly by whatever feels right in the moment, how the pieces of the story have fallen during that particular performance.
Like a macabre twist on musical chairs, as long as I was en pointe in Sander’s arms when the music stopped, the rest of the scene was mine to command.
When I picked up speed, Stephen, Noemi, Antoinette, and the others looked genuinely uneasy – they had no idea what I was going to do.
I followed Mariska’s advice and let my face do whatever it needed, limbs uncoordinated, my hair flying as I barged through the groups of corps dancers.
I shook Charlie by the shoulders, then leaned against Noemi while biting my knuckle as if trying to stifle a scream of anguish, thudding the air near Stephen’s chest with my fists.
He tried to approach, and yielded easily when I shoved him away.
When Sander caught me at the end of a whirlwind spin, I refocused my stare directly into the darkness of his pupils.
To my surprise as much as anyone else’s, a tear escaped my right eye. I don’t know you at all.
I pulled away from him and clamped a palm over my chest, belatedly aware of the blood still pumping out from my self-inflicted stab wound, my life draining.
I raised my hand with fingers splayed, Giselle coming back to reality just in time to recognise the red on her skin, before shooting up onto my toes with the same hand extended to the heavens, holding onto Sander’s T-shirt for balance.
Just to see if I could, I exhaled on my way down to the floor so that when I lay supine, my chest stayed perfectly still, as if I really were dead.
I breathed only when Sander threw himself against me.
Lori worked the piano until the studio filled with a tragic crescendo of overlapping notes, like a flood destroying everything in its path.
Eyes closed, I heard the shuffle and gasps of dancers hovering around me: Stephen pulling Sander off, almost getting into a fistfight; Fiona and Isabel, clutching my hands, stroking my hair, shaking my shoulders.
Finally, Sander lifted my upper body off the floor so he could hold me close, then Noemi pushed him away and rocked me back and forth, her breathing strained.
‘And… finis.’ Nick clapped loudly, everyone else joining in.
I blinked myself back to the studio’s fluorescent lighting.
Noemi smoothed out my hair, her amber and vanilla perfume filling my nose. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, thanks. Woo,’ I mumbled, fighting pins and needles in my feet and the rush in my ears.
She helped me up and gave my shoulder a quick squeeze. ‘Well done.’
Nick stepped forward. ‘Now that, ladies and gentlemen of the corps, is how you have a psychotic break.’