American Ballet Theatre returns to the Kennedy Center in ‘Giselle’ — and the company continues to reflect ballet’s best

American Ballet Theatre brought a heartbreakingly beautiful valentine to DC last week. The New York-based dance company performed the classic story ballet Giselle onstage at the Kennedy Center for a seven-day run in a production reminiscent of its groundbreaking run 40 years ago.

Giselle — with its themes of betrayal and the supernatural, common in Romantic period story ballets — is far from the classic love story one might expect for the week of Valentine’s Day, yet it was hard not to fall in love watching American Ballet Theatre (ABT) principal dancer Isabella Boylston save soloist Aran Bell from a last fatal dance.

The title character is a village girl whom we meet shortly before she falls in love with a peasant hunter. Eventually we — and Giselle — learn that the peasant hunter Loys is actually the noble-born Count Albrecht in costume, and that he is already engaged to a fellow noble. In shame and grief, Giselle goes mad and dies. In the ballet’s second act, Albrecht visits Giselle at her grave — and finds himself caught in the grasp of the wilis, a group of female spirits (think: ghosts) who seek vengeance for Giselle’s death by entrancing him to dance himself to death. In selfless romantic perfection, the ghost of Giselle protects Albrecht from the wilis, dancing with him until sunrise, when the wilis lose their power.  

In one of Giselle’s classic moments, 20-plus members of the company, adorned in flowing ankle-length white dresses, hold an arabesque position with leg raised above 90 degrees behind the body while moving across the stage in interlocking horizontal rows. A graveyard replaces the colorful peasant village of earlier action, and the dancers, portraying brokenhearted spirits, seem to show that one is never alone in sorrow.

Where the somber second act benefits from a ghostlike airiness, Boylston’s dancing in the first act was infused with a lightness fitting to Giselle’s character. In Act 1, she joyfully danced for Bell as much as she did for the audience, with air kisses and subtle arm gestures as memorable as technical elements such as hopping en pointe across the stage on one leg before circling the Opera House stage in a series of rapid turns.

Bell — who was promoted to soloist last year after joining the company at age 17 in 2016 — brought his experiences in lead roles in Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake to his portrayal of Count Albrecht. Here, in his Giselle debut, he embodied maturity beyond his actual years, with his technique deepened by brilliant acting; his display of grief at Giselle’s death and when visiting her grave left some in the Opera House in stunned silence and others in tears.

Corps de ballet dancer Marshall Whiteley had an impressive turn as Hilarion, the village huntsman with an unrequited love for Giselle. It is Hilarion’s calls on a hunting horn that summon Albrecht’s hunting party, inadvertently revealing his noble status, and it is Hilarion who reveals to the audience the wilis’ intentions as he is about to die at their hands. Soloist Katherine Williams, as Myrta, the queen of the wilis, delighted as she flew across the stage in tremendous leaps, her power reinforced by her unrelenting response to Hilarion’s and Albrecht’s exhausted pleas.

Jennifer Tipton’s lighting helped establish the eerie ambience of Act 2, as the stage flashed with lightning and the curtains closed on Bell alone in a false sunrise. Anna Anni’s costumes delightfully meshed the simplicity of Giselle’s traditional, barely blue dress in Act 1 with similarly monochrome oranges and peaches for the corps de ballet. Gianni Quaranta’s scenery in Act 1, with Albrecht’s castle visible in the background atop a mountain, perfectly set the scene for an idyllic village love story, adding to the impact when the act ends in tragedy.

Corps de ballet member Tyler Maloney stood out in the Peasant Pas de Deux, achieving a height on his jumps made all the more spectacular by his precise timing with the music composed by Adolphe Adam. Performing in perfect sync with Maloney in the Peasant Pas entrance was soloist Cassandra Trenary, who also danced a variation so sweet and delightful that one could not help but smile.

This Giselle, staged by ABT artistic director and Washington School of Ballet alumnus Kevin McKenzie, is a classic that will likely live on, with its forever-relevant theme of heartbreak. Forty years ago, ABT presented the same ballet at the Kennedy Center with staging by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who also performed as Albrecht. In 1980 the cast included Marianna Tcherkassky and Victor Barbee — then principal dancers with ABT — as well as many others who continue to influence the art form. Tcherkassky, a Washington School of Ballet alum, is now Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s ballet mistress; Barbee serves as The Washington Ballet’s associate artistic director and is married to Julie Kent, the Washington Ballet’s artistic director.

Boylston, Bell and the other members of the accomplished cast performing in ABT’s latest run of Giselle — including soloists Skylar Brandt and Joo Won Ahn in their Giselle debuts with the company — seem poised to join their predecessors in shaping the ballet world. Stella Abrera, who performed Saturday afternoon as Giselle, will return to the role in June at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House as her farewell ABT performance, having joined the New York-based dance facility Kaatsbaan earlier this year as its artistic director.

The ballet is chock-full of athleticism, an element that the ABT production delivers in spades. For Albrecht’s continuous jumps, Bell beat his legs in the air three times in each jump, crossing them back and forth and back again. And in Giselle’s Act 2 entrance, Boylston dizzyingly spun around on one leg, her head tucked against a delicately raised arm. But what makes Giselle such a watchable ballet is its heartbreaking innocence — Giselle picks petals from a flower to see whether Albrecht loves her, for instance, and then coquettishly dodges Albrecht’s kisses — followed rapidly by her devastating sorrow and shame. It makes for one of ballet’s best storylines, and in ABT’s run, it is performed by dancers up to the task.