sylvie guillem

on ballet and dance

As Sylvie Guillem interviews go this one is rather odd - it concentrates on dance! Sure there are lots of rather sensational stories about Guillem, all great for the Sunday Supplements but few pieces tend to concentrate on Guillem as a professional involved in dance. Indeed there are relatively few pieces anyway - Guillem has too much to do without interviews and the complications they inevitably raise.

The key to my interview was hearing about a Sylvie Guillem production of Giselle in Helsinki (right). Given that Guillem is who she is and this was a first foray into production / choreography, and a full length piece to boot I, for one, was surprised we had not heard much about it. Few, Le Monde aside, seemed to be aware of it or to have covered it.

Then we found out that she was dancing in two performances of her Giselle in February and the plot was hatched for an interview in Helsinki. An ideal opportunity to see the production and to talk to Sylvie about how it came to be and her wider thoughts and plans.

And after much to-ing and fro-ing, not least on the Intercontinental Hotel's messaging systems (phone, Teletext and hand written notes) I emerge from a lift to find her in the lobby. Gulp. I'm immediately rumbled as a man who needs a drink and she strides off suggesting the bar is the place to chat. I follow, grinning inanely no doubt. She is dressed in black and looks incredibly chic in her massive black moon boots (there is snow everywhere), jumbo black Puffa jacket (it's cold of course) and a scrummy micropleated dress (black also!), doubtless from a favourite Japanese designer.

As I consume a steadying beer, Sylvie consumes an apple (the bar being fresh out of Apricot juice). She is constantly checking and adjusting herself - her dress, her hair, her skin even. And she laughs a lot too, not least when I produce my (chic) MiniDisk recorder and an alarm mysteriously also goes off on my electronic organiser. "You're a maniac of the technology!" I admit it, of course.

When we met, I had still to see the new Giselle (that was the next night) and was eager to know more.

"The background is that one day someone said if you wanted to film a classical ballet which one would you do? And I said 'Well I would start with Giselle because it's not only a role for a dancer it's a role for a woman.' That's the first one that comes to my mind because I always saw the potential in it, but no production gave me ... what I was expecting from the character. So then I started to think about it and I started to prepare a script, to meet people and to do it exactly like a film. So then the time (came) when you have to go and see the Producer and the TV channel and the TV director and they look at you and say, well unless it's shot by Polanski and danced by Sylvester Stallone we won't do it!

"So I said, well it won't be danced by Sylvester Stallone and it won't be shot by Polanski but it will be with my own people and my own choice! So the project could not be made. The TV are not really interested in classical ballet. Even if it's a new way of seeing it, they are not really interested."

In preparing, she obviously needed a company and had asked Jorma Uotinen, the Finnish National Ballet Director, if his dancers were free to help. And as if you hadn't guessed, when the film idea came to nought Uotinen had the presence of mind to suggest a stage production instead and after a little more thought Guillem agreed.

Guillem's approach was naturalistic: to try to rid Giselle of its cliches while keeping the classical base. She wanted to make it more logical and relevant to modern audiences: "You are doing a ballet, so you must have choreography but at the same time, the choreography should not be free, it should not be just because we need choreography. The choreography should be here because it's a logical moment for it to be here. So it was quite interesting to work out and not to fall into the trap of the classical ballet: like we have this amount of music, then we dance, we dance, we dance. And (then) we act a little bit and then we dance, we dance, we dance! (yes!) So that was the most interesting part of it."

She thinks briefly: "In fact one of the most, because what I like very much also is to work with the dancers to try to explain what the characters are and who they were. Also working with the human being that was in front of me, just not treating him like a learner of steps you know. Just to make him understand that the character was this and that, but could be also this and that. The experience I have of acting and trying to express feeling, not just lifting the leg! Or when you lift the leg there is something to express."

Although she obviously loves the traditional Giselle, she still jumped at the opportunity to strip the story back to its essence and rethink each character from scratch. Hilarion, the boy-next-door who loses out to Giselle's aristocratic boyfriend, is normally played as a hairy oik which has always sounded a false note for Guillem: "There's nothing wrong with him. She just doesn't love him, that's all. That's why I tried to find a beautiful Hilarion, not a beast from the wood that no one will like."

For Guillem, the characters must have fully rounded emotional lives if they are to succeed on stage: "The rapport between the three people can be so tense and so true: you don't need to make a good one and a bad one."

Guillem also sandblasted the traditional mime sequences which in the wrong hands can degenerate into a kind of balletic ticktack. At first she wouldn't let the Finns use gestures at all: "Instead I made some dialogues for them but I said after a while, 'If you don't like my dialogues, write some more for yourselves but stop using your hands.' It was really silly at the beginning," she giggles mischievously, "I practically had to tie their arms to their sides."

Her pet hate is that strange 'hail-and-farewell' salute that infests so many ballets. She demonstrates, holding a hand in front of her, putting on an earnest, dramatic face. "It doesn't mean anything but they all go on stage like this: Swans; Wilis; trees . . ." She laughs: "Gilles calls it the 'taxi-call'." One of the great scenes for mooning about looking soulfully into the middle distance is Albrecht's first visit to Giselle's grave, complete with black velvet cape. Guillem couldn't be doing with it: "I said, I can't bear to watch Zorro any more! Instead we have no gesture at all, just the music and the sadness."

She seems almost surprised at the number of alterations that she made: "I didn't want to change anything in the beginning but in the end I changed 80 per cent of the steps."

As many will know, Giselle has always presented a huge contrast between the first and second acts and this has been maintained or even broadened in Guillem's production: "I wanted something more free, more human in the first act - more colourful, more active. I try to have a different view of a village and different characters also. I wanted the dancers to be people with a life before they go on stage and after they go on stage. All the history of a character. Even the small characters in it. So they were not treated as trees or scenery! - I don't want to use dancers like that - I wanted them to participate and to live and to make this village alive."

The second act is changed less - Guillem, like many of us, appreciates the power of white acts - "it makes the people see something extraordinary". However she "... wanted the Wilis to be more feminine, more witty, more like mermaids", indeed more like the Wilis in Heinrich Heine's original story. "So I gave them a bit better heart because normally they are like zombies! I wanted them more feminine, so I tried to put that also in it. But I wanted to keep what is effective in the second act - it's all the girls together. It's mixed up. So they have some moments where they can use their eyes and their smile."

In all Guillem spent six weeks with the company creating her Giselle, but this was spread over a longer period because of her schedule. It would have been rather longer had she not prepared so much in advance. But even so, as a project it grew a little bit in the making...

"So at the beginning I wanted to keep all of the choreography and do more like a 'mise en scene' (stage production). But then I couldn't keep the choreography and do a 'mise en scene' so I had to change a little bit the choreography, and little bit by little bit it's a lot! Especially in the first act it's quite a lot." she smirks! "Actually I almost change everything in the first act and I kept a few things in the second act!" So much for the best-laid plans. The Giselle is indeed quite different. Suffice it to say that it works rather well - particularly the naturalistic Act 1.

So what was it like creating so much choreography for the first time? "Well I didn't want to think of it as a creation of choreography. It just happened to be that I had to change some steps and to put them together and it end up as choreography." Guillem is keen to avoid unnecessary tags and to make it clear that this is no wholesale change of direction for her. Anyway for Guillem choreographers are those with a burning need to express themselves in a language like no other and that's not what she is about, although she clouds the issue by adding "...er, it starts to appear in my mind, maybe the will of doing something from nothing. Not just taking a ballet that exists and doing something out of it. And this a few years ago would not have crossed my mind."

If you ignore what it's called she is ready to do more in this area and particularly to help breathe new life into classics that she believes are slowly dying and becoming less relevant to people. But the position in 'new' or contemporary ballet is maybe even more worrying to her, since that represents the classics of tomorrow. While she might not like the tag, Guillem very much enjoys working with choreographers - "I like to try and understand them, I like to try and bring them things from me..." Naturally it leads to questions about who she likes working with. The initial answer is surprising: "Well I never had any problem to work with someone like Forsythe but it's a long time I haven't worked with him. So I won't say that I would not have any problem now!"

It's an odd answer in itself and illustrates something that came up a number of times in the interview - a careful use of words that takes nothing for granted. If something was fine in the past, it doesn't mean it will necessarily be the same in the future. People change: Guillem changes and those she works with do too. And in any event, she is aware that answers given off the cuff in earlier interviews can assume an almost permanent and stultifying significance as the years go by.

Article by by Bruce Marriott, April 1999