Houston Ballet: Maninyas and Giselle.

HOUSTON BALLET: MANINYAS AND GISELLE WORTHAM THEATER CENTER, HOUSTON, TX JUNE 17, 18, 2005

First staged at the Australian Ballet in 1986, this Giselle, produced by HB artistic associate Maina Gielgud, has the gift of narrative clarity. We knew from the start that Hilarion, a sturdy fellow danced wonderfully by Randy Herrera, was a peasant, and that Albrecht was royally. Clear too was how gradually the shy Giselle was seduced by Albrecht. Their eyes met often as they danced toward each other and away, overflowing with a love they wanted to share. Giselle's mother, played with warmth and devotion by Kim Wagman (who was herself pregnant), seemed to smell danger every time Albrecht came near her daughter. The corps dancers' joyous peasants seemed to really care for each other. When Giselle finally died, her friends and villagers surrounded her, and you felt the pathos in everyone's reaction. It brought this reviewer to tears in two performances.

Visually, too, the production had impact. Peter Farmer's realistic sets and costumes were intimate and enchanting. Giselle's hut was barely distinguishable from the surrounding woods; you could almost feel the dead leaves underfoot. And at Giselle's gravesite, the Wilis seemed to arise from the mist. When they chugged across the floor in earthbound arabesques, they gave a hint of their lethal power.

Small, with large eyes and dark hair, Leticia Oliveira made a dramatic, Fracci-like Giselle. With masterful technique and an unhinged mad scene, she commanded the first act. But the second act belonged to Zdenek Konvalina's Albrecht, with his self-effacing devotion and his 24 magnificent entrechat sixes, buoyant with determination. (But also because Oliveira became a bit stiff, sometimes locking her arms into proper Wili placement). In the last moments of the ballet, Konvalina stepped forward, devastated, awed by a spirit larger than his own.

The program opened with artistic director Stanton Welch's Maninyas, choreographed for San Francisco Ballet in 1996. A ballet for five couples and three huge hanging drapes, it started with a single dancer taking a spectacular billowy entrance that looked, under Lisa J. Pinkham's lighting, like some unidentifiable act of nature--a flood, a volcano? In a haunting mix of abandon and despair, the dancers thrust both arms upward on a diagonal, snapping their elbows until their hands flopped. Swishing their long skirts with their hands, the women were separate but equal, strong and feminine. Inventive, circular partnering brought Kylian to mind, and the lush female feistiness recalled that of fellow Aussie choreographer Meryl Tankard (though blessedly without her sense of menace between the sexes). An exquisite duet in blue, with wild lifts and sudden swirling falls, highlighted this beautifully crafted work. In one cast, Lisa Kaczmarek was tremulous and desperate; in the second, Barbara Bears was nurturing and tender.

I attended as a guest of the company and felt that, though this was a shinning performance of Maninyas, perhaps it should have been on a different program so that audiences could fully savor Giselle.

For more information: www.houstonballet.org.