by Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
A Worldstage Presentation at the Fleck Dance Theatre
May 4-8, 2010

   One of the most romantic of classical ballets has been turned into a vehemently sordid yet strangely affecting 80-minute dance by a thirteen-year old Irish dance company. Michael Keegan-Dolan, Artistic Director, of the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre has taken the Giselle libretto by the throat and forced it to submit to his own quirky imagination. His dancers hail from various countries (English is the first language of only six of the dancers), yet they comprise an extraordinary company that is unabashed to use quirkiness to its own advantage. In the original libretto, Giselle is a beautiful village girl who falls in love with handsome Albrecht, dies broken-hearted by her own hand at the end of Act One, and is transformed into a spirit or Wili (ghost of a woman who dies the night before her wedding). However, Keegan-Dolan’s Giselle is not that of Pavlova, Karsavina, Makarova, Merle Park, or even Gelsey Kirkland. The title character remains a simple girl—this time an Irish one (Giselle McCreedy) from Ballyfeeny—but she is down to a single parent, her mother, an enthusiast of dance (played by black dancer Emmanuel Obeya), having committed suicide and her father (Bill Lengfelder) functioning as a chorus while sitting atop an electric pole rather like St. Simeon Stylites the Elder. She has a nasty psychotic, incestuous-prone brother Hilarion (Michael Dolan) who is one of the seediest, scariest villains imaginable. Yet he is not the only distempered character. There is the nymphomaniac Nurse Mary (played by Mikel Murfi) and a wild knife-wielding Pat Dunne, the butcher’s son (Neil Paris). As for the title character, this is not a soft, coy Giselle, whose beauty would seduce just about any of the villagers. As played by Daphne Strothmann, she is dumbstruck and asthmatic, wheezing breathlessly when under stress. She is overpowered by the attentions of Albrecht, but the Albrecht is now a bisexual line-dance instructor from Bratislava (Milos Galko), who is wont to cruise his dance class and offer his ass to the local butcher’s son. Giselle does die in this version, too, and she becomes a supernatural being, but Michael Keegan-Dolan’s version is miles apart from the original Theophile Gautier libretto.

   What especially distinguishes this piece, apart from some extraordinarily staged choreography, is its achievement as narrative dance. Using a fundamentally bare floor and minimal décor, the piece has extraordinary lighting by Adam Silverman (severely stark or hauntingly poetic). It does not dance in silence, but uses dialogue and choric narration to further its plot. So, though an audience might wonder just when the actual dancing will begin, there are half-articulated dance phrases early in the piece, till the full flow of the choreography commences, and then the level of intensity rises to an almost demoniac pitch. Keegan-Dolan is not shy to use camp in the comedy sequences—especially in Mikel Murfi’s characterization of Nurse Mary and the hilarious line-dance that looks as if the whooping cowboys of Oklahoma! were dancing under the influence of Brokeback Mountain—but he torques the drama to the verge of near hysteria (especially in the full-throttle performance of Michael Dolan’s violent Hilarion that morphs into equine lust and power). Then, in a stunning coup de theatre in the second act, after his Giselle dies of a severe asthmatic attack, he achieves a hypnotic poetic beauty in the Wilis sequence, where the spirits of the dead emerge from multiple traps in the dance floor and use dust clouds and long, dangling ropes from which to execute a fascinating choreography of eerie surrealism and romantic fatalism. This is Giselle’s apocalyptic transformation, and after a wonderful pas de deux with her Albrecht, she is translated into a figure of buoyant liberation.  

photos: T.Charles Erickson

photo: Daphne Strothmann (Giselle)

pic2: Line-dance from Giselle

pic (L-R) Emmanuel Obeya and Daphne Strothmann in Giselle


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