Miyako Yoshida first performed the title role in Giselle with the Royal Ballet in 1997. Now, as the artistic director of ballet and dance at Tokyo’s New National Theatre, she returns to Covent Garden with the very same classic. It’s the UK debut of a National Ballet of Japan production – the company’s first overseas tour in 16 years.
Giselle’s romantic tragedy plays out in a 19th-century village fashioned on stage by the award-winning designer Dick Bird and in sound by the composer Adolphe Adam’s airy, whimsical 1841 ballet suite. The beautiful peasant girl Giselle (Yui Yonezawa) falls in love with Prince Albrecht (Shun Izawa), only to die tragically of heartbreak. After her demise, she joins a flock of the Wilis – vengeful, heartbroken wraiths who lure young men to their deaths. All of this unfolds in a whirl of aproned skirts and tight-laced stays that turn into gauzy, virginal dresses when the score slips into the minor keys of the second and final act.
This is a resplendent marriage of characterisation and Marius Petipa’s late-19th-century choreography. The dancers rise to the challenge of a demanding repertoire: the polished synchronisation, the hauntingly beautiful sequences of Wilis in the foggy, moonlit graveyard of act two, and the footwork whose intricacy requires immense stamina, of corps and principals alike. In homage to the classical ballets of the 19th century, the dancers elegantly deepen the narrative by drawing on the traditions of mime – a secretive and silent communication that has fallen sadly out of favour on stage.
The audience was transfixed. The house filled with a cacophony of applause on more than one occasion, amid variations that kept us in awe.
Classical ballet came late to Japan’s stage, only arriving after the Second World War, and Japanese ballet has, in turn, been late to ours. It would be a pleasure to watch the National Ballet of Japan here again; let’s hope it doesn’t take another 16 years.
Giselle
The Royal Opera House, London WC2
[See also: 150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen]
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This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent