Time blunts the radical. Yet when Stravinsky’s Les Noces sounds across the elegantly transfigured spaces of a former fireworks factory in Woolwich, it rings as shockingly original as it did on its premiere in 1923. Giselle, with Adolphe Adam’s tinkling score wafting across the London Coliseum’s gilded auditorium, not so much.
Mary Skeaping’s 1971 production of this great Romantic ballet for English National Ballet, however, has the merit of reminding us just why, in 1841, it too was full of the shock of the new. A story about the exploitation of the lower classes; an eerie supernatural second act; a heroine dancing on pointe shoes, light as a feather, seeming to materialise out of the air; a ballerina taking centre stage for the first time.
