GISELLE

In the organizer's words:

A seemingly idyllic, rural village life by day and, parallel to this, an eerie dance of ghosts at night: these two realities characterize the events on stage in Giselle. Laurent Hilaire presents his own, slightly adapted version of Giselle to the Munich audience for the first time. Based on the original choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot and its further development by Marius Petipa, the director of the Bayerisches Staatsballett has created a version that uses choreographic and dramatic adaptations to bring the work more into the present day and make it even more immediate for the audience. The set and costumes of Peter Wright's production, which was in the repertoire from 1974 to 2025, have been retained.

Giselle is a young girl who first falls in love, then falls into madness and finally turns into a "Wili". The plot of the ballet is based on a text by Heinrich Heine, who recounts the legend of these nocturnal elemental spirits as follows: "The Wilis are brides who died before the wedding. The poor young creatures cannot lie quietly in their graves; in their dead hearts, in their dead feet, there still remains that desire to dance which they could not satisfy in life, and at midnight they rise up, gather in troops along the military roads, and woe betide the young person who meets them there! He must dance with them, they embrace him with unbridled rage, and he dances with them, without rest or respite, until he falls down dead."