François Gremaud presents both a (re)reading and a new per­form­ance of the fam­ous bal­let Gis­elle, as a love let­ter to the per­form­ing arts and the per­formers who make the art form what it is. His joy, exulta­tion and curi­os­ity will be embod­ied by dan­cer Sam­antha van Wissen.

A mas­ter­piece and the arche­type of Romantic bal­let, Gis­elle (1841) presents a naive young peas­ant girl who dies after learn­ing that the man she loves, Albrecht, is a noble­man engaged to a prin­cess. The queen of the Wil­is – young girls turned into ghosts for hav­ing danced too much – sen­tences Albrecht to dance to his death, but the spir­it of Gis­elle saves him by dan­cing with him. With his Gis­elle… and its ellip­sis con­vey­ing lib­er­a­tion, François Gremaud cre­ated an (almost) solo for Sam­antha van Wis­sem, who has worked extens­ively with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker; in the piece, van Wis­sem starts by attempt­ing to talk about the bal­let and ends up telling its story and per­form­ing it. The piece stays faith­ful to the ori­gin­al lib­retto by Théo­phile Gau­ti­er, the music by Adol­phe Adam (adap­ted by Luca Anti­g­nani and per­formed live by four musi­cians) and to the cho­reo­graphy by Jean Cor­alli and Jules Per­rot, and it exper­i­ments with the “reduc­tion of a piece to a solo per­former”, a form that the Swiss author and dir­ect­or has already worked with in his Phèdre! It is a lov­ing trib­ute and an exper­i­ence to be shared, an ecstat­ic and poet­ic unveil­ing of the cogs and wheels of drama, a mar­riage between text and par­a­text, between the piece and its per­former, that François Gremaud defines in the most gen­er­ous way possible.