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Thursday, June 11 , 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

On ‘Creole Giselle’, a re-
imagined classic ballet

Many ballet stories are weird.
Swans falling in love, dolls being mis-
taken for humans and the Christmas-
time obsession with a nut-cracking
device all pass as normal. We accept
their quirks because their music
and choreography are about more
than their stories. Adolphe Adam’s
“Giselle” is different. “Giselle” has
an awesome story. Arthur Mitchell
might have known this more than
anyone.
Albrecht is a womanizing prince
who pretends to love Giselle, a peas-
ant, while he is actually engaged to
be married. When she learns of his
trickery she dies of heartbreak and
swiftly joins an army of female ghosts,
here called willis, dedicated to the
destruction of all men who cross their
path. When Albrecht comes looking
for Giselle’s grave (a little too late,
don’t you think?), the kingdom of
female afterlife forces him to dance
until his own death — it’s a delicious
ending to a beautiful show. Originally
premiered in Paris in 1841, the ballet
enjoyed immediate success, eventu-
ally travelling across Europe and into
America in 1846.
The show is easily one of the most-
performed productions in ballet
today, but it’s also quite symbolic of
a racially oppressive past. The willis
dance in white dresses that match a
historically white skin uniform that
excluded any dancers of color long
past its 19th century premiere.
Arthur Mitchell’s “Giselle” is dif-
ferent. First created in 1984 for his
all-black company Dance Theatre of

Harlem, the production eventually
won a Laurence Olivier Award for its
ingenious handling of history, ballet
and American art. Mitchell enlisted
Frederic Franklin to restage the clas-
sic story using his cast of all-black
dancers. Franklin abandoned the
show’s original Rhineland setting and
moved his production to the Ameri-
can South on a farm in Louisiana. He
kept the choreography true to the
1841 original and maintained Adolphe
Adam’s masterful music. They named
their new show “Creole Giselle.”
This past weekend, DTH streamed
a 1987 recording of “Creole Giselle”
on YouTube. The New York Times
named the show one of “Six things
to do at home this weekend,” and the
recording accrued over 7,000 views in
one day. Though blurry and at times
darkly lit, the show boasted crisp
technique from its dancers and its
refreshing design shone as an artistic
tour de force.
Watching the video, I wondered:
Why haven’t more companies taken
Mitchell as an example for them-
selves? Marketing departments often
complain of audiences who feel dis-
connected from classical ballet sto-
ries — what do we have in common
with a German peasant, a Russian
swan or a lifelike dancing doll? These
feelings of separation can be even
greater for people of color who have
been excluded from such shows on
the basis of historically white casting
and in some ballets, problematic por-
trayals of Eastern cultures. Mitchell
knew this because he and his dancers
had lived it, but he did not allow the
outer image of “Giselle” to push him
away. Stripped of costumes and cast-

ing choices, every ballet to have sur-
vived so many years tells omnipresent
stories of love and loss. Often referred
to as the Hamlet of ballet, “Giselle”’s
dazzling music and dreamy dancing
sets a golden standard of such emo-
tions, and there is power and inten-
tion in DTH’s choice to perform the
work in full: Black dancers, and all
dancers of color, are equally able to
display the universal facets of the
human condition that “Giselle” and
every one of its 19th century coun-
terparts explore. Such themes do not
belong to one era or one people, yet
their current packaging can some-
times make it seem to be so.
What’s stopping other major bal-
let companies from reconsidering
their 19th century reproductions?
Could “Swan Lake” happen on the
shores of Lake Michigan? Wouldn’t
“Le Corsaire” work well on a Navy
ship? Perhaps “Coppelia”’s doll fac-
tory could be set in industrial-age
America. More recently than Mitch-
ell, “Final Bow for Yellowface” author
Phil Chan told Megan Fairchild in an
interview in May that he’s been work-
ing on a new version of “La Bayadere”
set in 1930s Hollywood rather than
an ill-represented India. The new
approach, Chan said, “makes that
story about us instead of them. When
Mitchell moved DTH’s “Giselle” to
the Antebellum South in 1984, he was
doing just that: Through a simple set
change, his show could tell the stories
that belonged to his dancers and not
the all-white group from 150 years
prior.

ZOE PHILLIPS
Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

SUMMER SERIES
SUMMER SERIES

‘Girl, Serpent,
Thorn’ is fresh

A sign of a compelling book is the
inability to look away from the page.
When reading Melissa Bashardoust’s
“Girl, Serpent, Thorn,” my nose stayed
glued to the e-book screen. Despite the
questionable pacing and unfulfilled
storylines, I chugged her book down
like a gloriously cold bottle of water on
a scorching summer day.
I was immersed in Melissa Bashar-
doust’s fictionalized Persian empire.
Her mythic world documents sprawl-
ing palaces, dangerous ladies and
looming demonic forces. In that vast
world, a young princess, Soraya, is
isolated from the rest of the popula-
tion. Her poisonous touch makes her a
threat to the kingdom. While her twin
brother rules the realm, she is touch-
starved and relegated to her bedroom,
and can only travel
through the palace’s
secret
passageways.
To change her fate,
she is tempted by
the mythic demons
whose
power
she
has been gifted. That
temptation leads her
and her kingdom to
their destruction and
ultimate resolution.
Soraya stands for every reader
unaware of their potential and power.
She is a poster child for internalized
self-loathing but lacks the vocabu-
lary to identify her insecurities. She’s
lonely and afraid of her own abilities.
She wants friends but fears for their
safety. She fundamentally wants some
permanence in a world determined to
obscure and deny her existence. Very
few novels represent internalized self-
loathing and confusion as clearly as
Bashardoust’s.
Bashardoust’s ancient Persian set-
ting functions more as a vague aesthet-
ic stage for magical plot devices than
as an immersive world. Bashardoust’s
primary focus is her character-driven
drama. There is very little within the
novel grounded in history. Further-
more, the broader war between Sora-
ya’s civilization and the demonic
forces that plague them goes unex-
plored and unquestioned. The greater
in-world conflict is a watery backdrop
for Soraya’s struggle to identify her
wants within a cacophony of conflict-

ing opinions and expectations.
Though “Girl, Serpent, Thorn” is
not compelling in setting, its strengths
lie in its willingness to focus on indi-
vidual autonomy. In many respects,
Bashardoust’s protagonist is atypical.
Soraya’s backstory and actions code
her as an antihero but while she ques-
tions morality, her greatest sin is out
of her power. She’s too powerful and
influential to make childish mistakes.
Soraya does not mean harm but all
her actions have consequences. While
confused and hurting, Soraya cripples
her kingdom’s defenses, allowing a
hoard of demons to overtake the land.
Soraya’s mistakes and selfish desire
sets her apart from others in the YA lit-
erary canon. Bashardoust allows Sora-
ya to impart devastating destruction
on those around her, then forces her to
clean up her mess. But despite her self-
ishness, you can’t help but empathize
with her character. Soraya has not
only been deprived
of human company
but also the ability to
make mistakes. That
tragedy drives Sora-
ya’s desire for restitu-
tion and foretells her
kingdom’s doom.
Soraya’s
atypical
character
construc-
tion is one example
of how Bashardoust’s novel plays Rus-
sian roulette with expectations. Vet-
eran YA readers are trained to pick up
on genre tropes and plotlines. Soraya
has two love interests. Early hints
flag each character as a contender
for her heart. But unlike other YA
novels, ultimately neither love inter-
est is fighting for Soraya’s heart. They
are vying to influence her worldview
and self-perception. Through min-
ute framing differences, Bashardoust
flaunts romantic expectations while
never straying beyond the bounds of
YA convention. Her novel features the
YA hallmarks, such as: The powerful
magic woman who doesn’t know she’s
special, dark and mysterious boys and
looming existential threats. However,
the novel does not attempt to sub-
vert the genre conventions. Instead,
Bashardoust rearranges the tropes
by compressing the novel’s timeline.
Common YA tropes act as temporary
red herrings for seasoned readers.

LIZZY YOON
Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

“Girl, Serpent, Thorn”
Melissa Bashardoust
Flatiron Books
July 7, 2020

BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW