It’s October and here at PNB, we’re reflecting on our most spine-tingling ballets. Keep scrolling for these pieces that are guaranteed to get you into the Halloween mood!
And as a bonus, we put together a playlist of music from these works to keep ghostly good times going!
Giselle
Ballet’s best Romantic-era ghost story. Giselle has everything: romance, royalty in disguise, and a troupe of ghost women hauntingly floating through a forest. First performed in 1841, Giselle remains a popular ballet that is performed every season by major companies on both sides of the Atlantic and the subject of several popular books. The ballet is also widely available on commercial DVDs, and some of its scenes have even been featured in Hollywood films.
Of course the title character Giselle, the very embodiment of the contrast between the real and unreal worlds, surely accounts for much of Giselle’s enduring popularity. She is a sparkly, high-spirited young person whose ghostly return in Act Two as a Wili makes for a stunning character transformation. Giselle is a great ballerina role, and through the generations, it has inspired many famous interpretations—by Pavlova, Karsavina, Spessivtzeva, Alonso, Ulanova, Markova, Fonteyn, Verdy, Fracci, among others—which have become legendary in the annals of the stage.
Read Giselle scholar Marian Smith’s full program notes on our repertory page.
La Sonnambula
La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), originally called Night Shadow, reveals Balanchine at his most mystical, operatic, and European. Set in a darkly mysterious masked ball, the one-act ballet tells the story of a Poet who pays suit to a Coquette, who is escorted by the Baron. After a series of exotic divertissements, the elegantly attired guests go in to supper, leaving the Poet to himself. In a moment, an apparition in white enters. She is a beautiful Sleepwalker. Entranced, the Poet tries repeatedly to wake her, but she eludes him. The jealous Coquette informs the Baron of the Poet’s advances to her; enraged, he stabs the Poet. The Sleepwalker reappears to bear the Poet’s lifeless body away.
La Valse
George Balanchine’s La Valse (The Waltz) is another one-act narrative similar to La Sonnambula. The events of the ballet also take place at a doomed party—a ballroom full of waltzing couples. The main pointe dancer is dressed in white and she is drawn to begin dancing with a solo waltzer dressed all in black.
“The Waltz” is a misnomer for the ballet, as there are two different Maurice Ravel waltz pieces that score the dance work. Balanchine intent was to choreograph the ballet to Ravel’s La Valse because Sergei Diaghilev originally commissioned the score from Ravel for his own company, Ballets Russes. Diaghilev rejected Ravel’s La Valse, calling it a “masterpiece” but “not a ballet.” La Valse proved to be slightly too short for what Balanchine had in mind so he added Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (a piece of music with eight waltz movements) to the beginning of the ballet.
From Pacific Northwest Ballet’s program notes for La Valse, written by Jeanie Thomas:
“We are dancing on the edge of a volcano,” Ravel wrote in his notes on La Valse, quoting the Comte de Salvandy. His words are an apt description of both his music and Balanchine’s neo-romantic choreography: couples waltzing in a cavernous ballroom where a woman in white is at once horrified and fascinated by the uninvited figure of death who ultimately claims her life.
As the ballet progresses, the waltzes become more and more frenetic (similar to The Red Shoes). And in the final segment, the figure of Death appears to the woman in white. He offers her a black necklace, black gloves, a black dress, and a black bouquet. Enthralled, she accepts them and dances to her death.
