Let’s talk about a performance that doesn’t just live up to the hype—it redefines it. Last night at the Royal Opera House, Marianela Nuñez and William Bracewell didn’t just dance *Giselle*; they breathed a shocking, vital new life into its 180-year-old bones. Forget everything you thought you knew about this ballet. This was different.
From the moment Nuñez stepped into the light of Act I, the old archetype of the frail, lovesick peasant girl evaporated. Her Giselle was a young woman of profound emotional intelligence and simmering intensity. The joy in her early scenes with Bracewell’s Albrecht wasn’t just girlish infatuation; it was the radiant, unguarded happiness of a soul who believes it has found its mirror. This made the Mad Scene not a descent into hysterical fragmentation, but a terrifyingly lucid unraveling. Every glance, every tremor was a piece of her logic shattering. You didn’t watch her go mad; you felt the world dissolve around her. It was acting of the highest order, expressed through a technique so flawless it became invisible.
And then, William Bracewell. Here is an Albrecht for the modern age. Gone is the foppish aristocrat toying with a village girl. Bracewell presented a man genuinely, devastatingly in love but crippled by the gulf between his station and his heart. His remorse in Act I was palpable, his grief in Act II, transcendent. When he entered the forest glade, it was as a man already half a ghost himself, his partnering of the willful, etherial Myrtha (a formidable Fumi Kaneko) and the forgiving Giselle a masterpiece of desperate longing and physical exhaustion. His final collapse was not a theatrical gesture, but the inevitable conclusion of a spiritual annihilation.
This is where the magic happened: the partnership. The chemistry between Nuñez and Bracewell wasn’t staged; it was a deep, resonant current that powered the entire tragedy. In Act II, their *pas de deux* became a conversation beyond words. Her bourrées didn’t just float; they were sighs on the air. His lifts weren’t displays of strength, but acts of tender, hopeless devotion. When she offered the lily, it felt less like forgiveness and more like a shared, sorrowful understanding of fate’s cruel design. They made the supernatural profoundly human.
The corps de ballet, as the Wilis, were a chilling, synchronized force of nature—a relentless, beautiful wave of vengeance. Under the baton of Koen Kessels, Adam’s score throbbed with new dramatic urgency.
So, why does this performance feel definitive? Because it traded Gothic melodrama for raw, psychological truth. Nuñez and Bracewell removed the dusty glass case from this classic and showed us the painfully beating heart inside. They proved that *Giselle* isn’t a relic about ghosts and guilt; it’s a timeless story about love, betrayal, and the unbearable cost of both.
Last night wasn’t just a review. It was a revelation. For anyone who says ballet lacks emotional heft or contemporary relevance, this *Giselle* is your irrefutable answer. The bar has not just been raised; it has been placed in an entirely new stratosphere.
