The story is well-known: Giselle discovers that the man she loves is in reality a prince betrothed to another woman. Devastated by grief, the young peasant girl succumbs to madness and dies. She joins the Wilis, young brides to be who have died before their nuptials and who condemn men to dance themselves to death. If this ballet, first performed in 1841, has lost nothing of its fascination over the centuries, it is particularly thanks to those bewitching winged creatures, the Wilis, dressed in tulle and on points. Anne-Marie Legrand, in charge of the Soft Dressmaking Workshop at the Palais Garnier, confides the secrets of the making of the emblematic tutus from the “white act” of Giselle.

The Soft Dressmaking Workshop (in French Atelier Flou, “flou” meaning blurred or indistinct) is dedicated to the conception of the female costumes, unlike the Tailoring Workshop, which makes the male costumes. Why these names? I couldn’t give you the exact reason. To my mind, when you look at a male costume made by the Tailoring Workshop, you notice that it has a more structured look, with fabric cut on a flat surface. For the female costumes, however, a large part of the work is done on the tailor's dummy because a pattern is not enough to work from. The fabrics are all-important and each one requires a particular approach. We have to be very reactive in our work, moulding and sculpting the fabric, particularly for the drapes. I think that’s where the term “flou” comes from, because we sculpt diaphanous fabric for women whose curves can be infinitely varied and subtle.

As head of the Soft Dressmaking Workshop, I prepare the models of the costumes. The decorators arrive at the workshops with designs that I make up in three dimensions. The designs are more or less flexible, depending on the decorators. I have to reconcile the vision of the artistic team with what we can do and especially with the constraints and particularities of dance costumes, which is our speciality. We make suggestions to the decorator and eventually the design is finalised. Then, I create a pattern which I pass on to my two workshop assistants who do the cutting out. Then they pass on the job to the nine dressmakers. We also use temporary staff when the workload is really heavy. At the moment, we’re working on a revival of the ballet Giselle as well as on two new productions so there are twenty-seven of us in the workshop!   

The costumes for Giselle are redone regularly for several reasons. Firstly, because it’s a ballet that occupies an important place in the company’s repertoire and which is often performed, in particular on foreign tours. The costumes get a lot of wear and are stocked in containers: the dancers barely have time to take them off before they are packed away, sometimes still slightly damp. Silk yellows very quickly so we have no choice but to renew the costumes.

Once the skirts and bodices have been cut out, the dressmakers get them ready for fitting. There are always two fitting sessions. At the first, the costume is not finished. Between the first and second fitting it takes five days' work to carry out the considerable job of pleating the organdy silk used for the Wilis. After the second fitting, we make the final adjustments to the bodice before we assemble it with the skirt. It is painstaking work, all done by hand, in order to fit it perfectly to the dancer's body.

There are various sorts of skirts and tutus. The type used in Giselle is what we call a “romantic tutu”. At the end of the 18^th century, with grand ballets like La Sylphide, the long skirt with several underskirts became the emblematic costume of the ballerinas. It is also known as the “Degas tutu” in reference to the painter Edgar Degas, who often took dancers as a subject for his paintings. But at the dawn of the 20^th century, the tutu was shortened, became rigid and began to be worn above the hips: the pancake tutu or English tutu was now the order of the day. This is the tutu used in Swan Lake, for example, and therefore the emblematic ballerina’s costume in the collective unconscious today.

Making the bodice and the tutu requires a considerable amount of work. One single tutu in Giselle takes 23 metres of tulle, cut into seven layers placed one on top of another. We use different types of tulle with different characteristics for each layer: first comes a stiffer tulle to structure the skirt then come layers of increasingly fine, supple tulle. The layers are gathered, pinned and stitched by hand, one by one, onto a yoke. Then we do what we call “points de bagage” : large, loose stitches that keep the layers together during performance. To make a complete costume, it takes at least sixty hours.

In the second act of Giselle, the dancers all wear romantic tutus and points, which is why it is called the “white act”. It’s the most enchanting and it’s when the plot moves into the realms of the supernatural. We are in the kingdom of the Wilis, ghosts of young women who died before their weddings. I think the tutus make an essential contribution to this unearthly atmosphere. Their whiteness seems to reflect the light of the moon, - it’s extremely beautiful. And the “unreal dance” with which they ensnare men would really lose something of its hypnotic power without the effects created by the fabric. The diaphanous quality of the tutu gives the Wilis' movements an ethereal and floating quality. In spite of the twenty metres of fabric, on stage it appears infinitely light. The romantic tutu has become an integral part of the ballet Giselle.

interviewed by Milena Mc Closkey

In the entire history of ballet, I know of nothing more perfect, more beautiful or greater than Giselle”, wrote Serge Lifar with alacrity. It is true that the popularity of Giselle has never wavered, and neither has its place among the most important creations in the history of ballet, and indeed dance in general. For whilst remaining the incarnation of a certain era, Giselle is timeless; the epitome of romantic ballet, modern re-readings of it have often sought only to render it yet more romantic.

If Giselle is rightly considered one of the summits of romantic dance, it is not only because this ballet, created around 1840 by Théophile Gautier and Jules-Henry Vernoy de Saint-Georges, is a product of its time; it is also because the many performances of it that have been given right up to our own time have revisited, accentuated and streamlined some of the elements that constitute its romanticism.

The story of Giselle was entirely inspired by German romanticism: the idea for it came to Gautier in response to a passage from the manifesto Über Deutschland (On Germany) by Heinrich Heine on the subject of Vile, creatures from German and Slavonic folklore, the ghosts of young fiancées dead before their nuptials and haunting the woods to carry off imprudent wanderers with them into the afterlife. The ballet’s plot, situated in a medieval, bucolic Germany, begins in the first act with a scene featuring folk dances whose strong “local colour” is reminiscent of certain works by Victor Hugo or Musset; and the second act, in which the Vile appear is dominated by a dreamlike, fantasmagorial atmosphere, heightened in the first production of the ballet by the decors of Charles Ciceri, “a great specialist of lighting effects, sunrises, moonlight and evocations from beyond the grave”, wrote Serge Lifar.

After a resoundingly successful period, in France and elsewhere, that continued up until the 1860s, Giselle seems to have gone out of fashion and disappeared from the bill. But the ballet was later to enjoy a renaissance in Russia, at the Mariinski Theatre in Saint Petersburg where, in 1884, 1887 and 1899, the French ballet master, Marius Petipa, presented new version of Giselle. In the course of these performances, the original libretto and the choreography were modified, notably, those elements judged to be purely decorative and not necessary to the drama were cut out.

It was in this new mould that, in 1910 and 1924, Giselle was re-exported back to France by the Russians, with memorable new productions. Deliberately modernised, the ballet radicalised certain elements that had been present initially and, as a result, it could be considered as even more romantic than the original. In Act II, for example, all the elements of daily reality, whose appearance contrasted with the ghostly presence of the Vile, were cut: the halt of the hunters at the beginning of the tableau, the confrontation between the peasants and the Vile that follows, and the arrival of Princess Bathilde at Albrecht’s side at the end (the curtain now falls on a despairing and solitary Prince). Thus the Act now belongs entirely to the Vile, nothing more disturbs the dreamlike and sepulchral atmosphere created by their presence on stage. In Act I, the “Madness Scene”, in which Giselle discovers that her love for Albrecht is impossible, was also modified: less danced, more mimed, it offered a vision of madness that was both more realistic and more dramatic.

As Lifar said, these changes contributed to a more “poetic” conception of ballet, in keeping, in his opinion, with what Gautier had wanted (Gautier had had to make a few concessions to his co-librettist Vernoy de Saint-Georges, a confirmed author of ballets orientated more towards entertainment and bourgeois drama) and closer to the spirit of German romanticism that had inspired him in the first place.

The interpreters of the role of Giselle also changed, and with them, the way the role was conceived. After Carlotta Grisi, the first Giselle, a blue-eyed blond whose appeal as a young peasant lay in her freshness and vivacity, the role was reinvented by the great Russian ballerinas who then appropriated it: Anna Pavlova, Olga Spessivtseva, mysterious brunettes who embodied a more tragic, ethereal Giselle, perfect when they mimed her madness or took on the aspect of ghosts clad in the winding sheets of the Vile.

Yesterday and today, Giselle embodies the apotheosis of Romantic ballet; but it is clear that, from one period to another, one is not speaking of entirely the same romanticism. The ballet that was performed in 1841 was of a prosaic, bucolic romanticism, still close to light entertainment, relying to a large extent on effects of local colour. In the 20^th century, it became more poetic, more absolute, with a romanticism dominated by themes of dreaming and death that, as a result, is timeless.

A woman climbs, falls, meets a man, falls in love, falls once more and dies. When she climbs, it is gravity that she defies each day, detaching herself from the world and from human reality. Like a Vila, the woman abandons herself to her dance until she reaches a state of exhaustion. The apogee of a new romantic aesthetic, Giselle celebrates the ballerina on pointes whose tutus of white tulle give an impression of floating. Emmanuelle Pagano takes up this ballet and considers this illusion of etherealness, evoking the sad destiny of those women dead for love and grief, lost forever in the abysses of the void.

First of all, she fell upon me. Literally.
She lost her grip on the rock face. It was the second time she had fallen, before she lost her grip for good, the third time, the fatal one.
The first time, it was a separation, the second, a meeting, and the third, another separation. Definitive.
There were so many separations between us. More or less prolonged. Before the last. The final one. There were so many, so many days and nights, those days and those nights when I waited for her, when I imagined her in someone else’s arms.
I preferred to think of her in the arms of a man, I had terrible and ridiculous rows with her out of jealousy: with such a man I could have competed, I imagined myself as his rival. I was in with a chance.
But there was no man, only the rock. Which took her, and kept her, even at night, as long as the moon illuminated the pockets and crimps in the cliff wall. Then, she opened her body in the dark, unleashing the full extent of her desire for the rock.
There had been men, and especially one, one man, but that was before me. She left him just as she met me, as she was to leave me, as she would one day die: falling. It was him who belayed for her. He had saved her life. She could not bear the fact that he had witnessed her fall, she could not bear the fact that he had saved her life, that he had stopped her from dying but not from ricocheting against the rock, crashing from injury to injury, from humiliation to humiliation. He was her climbing buddy, and after him there was no one else. Never again a man between her and the rock face.
When she fell, the first time, she banged against the rock so much that her body was grazed and bruised from head to toe. She had become one immense bruise, of varying shades, purplish, yellow, black and green: She had taken on the colour of the rock. She had become all the colours that a rock can be. That first marriage was violent, fusional. It inaugurated what climbing was to become for her: a total hand-to-hand combat.
It wasn’t without a struggle that she agreed to be rescued and taken to hospital, that she agreed to be emptied under anaesthetic of the huge pockets of blood that enveloped her.
I never knew anything about that fall, about her life with her climbing partner, of their climbing partnership, I never knew anything about that life before her death. She carefully hid it from me. But, after her burial, he came to see me, the man who had saved her life, and who had so wounded her, on the rock face, in his pride. He came to see me, and we wept together, we spoke of her, of her prowess, of her falls.
With me, it was different, it was a short fall, which would have gone unnoticed and from which she would have hardly suffered if she had landed on the pebbles, if I had not been there. Not even a bruise. Not a single bruise on her.
She fell on me, in the cove, when I had just fallen asleep, knocked out after my swim, and from the heat, the summer suffusing my exhausted body with a gentle heat. The creek was out of bounds because rocks often fell from the cliff; I knew it, I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t the only one to defy the restriction. But I was not expecting to be landed on by a woman.
I bore the brunt of her; she crashed into me, my body breaking her fall.
Of course, she regained her balance. Just about. I got away with a bruise, and she was uninjured. Just wounded pride, again. Not a word but a smile, a grace in that wound that charmed me from the outset.
Later, she would tell me that to lose one’s balance, on such an easy cliff, during a simple excursion in verticality, was something shameful. She didn’t know where to put herself. It wasn’t that she had landed on me, or even that she’d hurt me, no, it was to have lost her grip there, with something so easy.
I’d seen clearly that she hadn’t known where to put herself, and that she was so beautiful in her embarrassment, even if I mistook its cause. I massaged my shoulder with a smile. I behaved as if I hadn’t noticed her embarrassment, even though that was precisely what had already seduced me.
When you love somebody that much, you love their faults, their weaknesses. More than all the rest.
I didn’t know that she would look even more beautiful to me without her embarrassment, when I saw her espouse the rock with her body, when I saw her dance on it, her gestures perfect, in a flawless choreography dictated by the rock face. Still more beautiful, but less touching. Still more beautiful, but inaccessible.
At first, when I watched her climb with an ease that pinned me to the ground, I wasn’t merely in love, I was gripped.
Then, when I shook myself a bit, I was jealous. I was jealous of other climbers, but I soon realised that I had nothing to fear from them: it was when she climbed solo that she drifted away from me. The other climbers didn’t interest her, only the rock held her, totally, and when she climbed solo, she was utterly elusive.
Then she started climbing entirely without any safety measures, save the strength of her own body, her mind and, sometimes the cushioning of water, the possibility of falling, but without ever, ever falling except deliberately, gently, at the end of the day, to cool off and rest.
She began to climb completely solo and bare-handed, without any equipment, no ropes, no belaying, no nothing.
She wanted to be able to really feel the rock face vibrate, to espouse the cliff to the point of adhering to it, in order to, she used to say, fit herself to its contours, read the braille of its asperities and of what she called “the way”.
I think it is then that I lost her, that we all lost her, that she lost herself. When the hand-to-hand with the rock would brook no intermediary, barely even her clothes, reduced to a minimum in the lingering summers in the hollows of gorges where the limestone flesh still offered up its heat to her already sweat-soaked body. Heat stored up there, perhaps for her, all day. The water remained, below, to refresh her little dance. That water was only a prolonging of the cliff, a sort of recompense, from which I was excluded.
She only let herself drop into it once she had exhausted every crevice and handhold in the rock, once she had played with her equilibrium on the edge until her thirst was quenched. The call of the water was only the sequel to the call of the rock.
Sometimes she stilled her movements in the crevices where the water also rested awhile before falling in a series of cascades downstream, pooling in the limestone hollows then becoming river once more. Here warm body hugged the cool of those natural pools, interrupting the downward cascade for a moment: you could hear a change in the sound of the water, or perceive an alteration in the rhyme of its fall. This musicality, it was her, curled up, upstream. Her, like a barrier. Before stretching herself and restoring to the water its voice. Before stretching herself and resuming her acrobat’s pathway.
During those summers she climbed in a swimsuit, sometimes naked, flirting with the river that splashed her as she leaned out. She dipped her weight into it, that lightness that she left abandoned to the eddying current, in a swinging movement to transfer her body from one side to the other, with a perfect awareness of her centre of gravity, that she worked on unceasingly and that called simply “my core”.
Working on her core was to sharpen a plumb line that ran through her abdomen at the height of her navel and circulated in her legs which were almost always apart, sharpening it until she could feel it, until it hurt, so as never to forget it.
Always to be balanced, at the cost of contortions ever more painful. She worked like that, honing her suppleness by suffering around the taut line between her thighs, hooked on the intoxication of climbing, climbing ever higher, going always farther, exploring the world upside down, head first.
I wasn’t there, of course, I saw nothing of all this but I could imagine it from what she told me, when at last she returned.
She did not have the humility of the really great climbers, who know that there is no possible second chance. She did not tell herself, I am not allowed to fall. She never fell, but out of pride. Except that one time, the time we met. I had not measured the consequences of her wound – that second wound to her pride – I had not understood that she would always resent me because of that fall, that she would leave me for the same reason that had provoked our meeting, that had brought us together.
Her fall.
Her fall, although so minor, so derisory, was a misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding drove us apart.
She left me falling, a third and last time, she left me in dying. I’m well aware that she had already left me, a long time ago, as she had left everybody, when only her dance above the whirlpools retained her, surrounded by birdsong and the minute cries of the rock, which she listened to attentively. She often spoke to me about that, the cry of the rock, the rustlings that called to her. Sometimes echoes.
She could not countenance that these noises – she called them “music” – emanated from herself, that it was she, as she climbed, who produced them. The impact of her feet breaking off fragments of stone, her hands widening the cracks, her knees and elbows, scraping the rock face, grazing themselves on the cliff, to open up new routes. Routes for her alone, that she would reveal to no one.
She made virgin rock groan as she opened up its pathways, jealously held secret. These groans, she said they called to her, that she had to climb, and climb, in order to answer. Groan in her turn. And appease them, quieten them.
Quieten them in her head.
Her holds, all her holds, espousing the cracks, had become high risk. She took no precautions in the fissures, she sought them out, enlarged them, made them her own.
The rock, which for a long time had given her strength, now passed on its fragility. She told me: “Don’t you understand, when I stop climbing, it’s as if I were tearing myself apart”.
I didn’t understand, no, I reminded her that I loved her, that I could no longer stand her remoteness, the dangers she ran. That’s what I said but, in reality, I understood. I understood that she had lost all contact with me, all contact with us, all contact with what one might call reality, the world of men.
She pressed herself so close to the rock that I was afraid that she would tear herself apart, as she put it, that she would tear her skin, together with the bit of rock. I imagined her laying down her skin like those peel-off silicone membranes used to clean historic monuments that are too fragile for pressure washing, cataplasms that are delicately peeled away to remove impurities from them.
But I was wrong. It wasn’t the rock she was cleaning as she fused her body with it, it was herself. She scraped off everything that encumbered her. And, making herself so light in order to climb, she was, perhaps, seeking only that, her lightness. To unburden herself, on the pretext of climbing.
Unburden herself of what, I did not know.
I did not know what was encumbering her, weighing her down.
When we made love, however, she was detached.
When we made love, she was heavy, of a disconcerting passivity, she who could fling herself upwards with such ease, in order to climb, seeking out every foot and finger hold, scenting the rock, in a gestural form of climbing made possible by her inexhaustible muscular strength of which I suspected the origin: an extraordinary desire, hunger.
She was hungry for the rock.
And gave herself to it utterly.
When she fell, she did not die straight away.
She died, as they say, “from her injuries”, several days later. But not in hospital, not in my arms, not in anybody else’s arms. She died alone, in a ravine. In the rock’s embrace.

“Our season includes both new productions and works from our repertoire: in other words, certain works are billed time and again and become part of the Paris Opera’s heritage. An emblematic work like Giselle is obviously just such a work. This romantic ballet, first performed at the Paris Opera on 28^th June 1841, has been revived many times in many different productions. In 1991, for its 150^th anniversary, Patrice Bart readapted the choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot and the sets were redone by the Italian scenographer, Silvano Mattei, one of the greatest backcloth painters, using original designs by Alexandre Benois. If Giselle is still performed and appreciated today, it is largely thanks to the Paris Opera.

With the passing of time, many things have changed: first of all the type of sets used for operas and ballets. At the beginning of the last century and during the 19^th century, most sets were painted canvas backcloths using trompe-l’oeil effects and theatres were equipped to accommodate and stock them safely. At the Palais Garnier, for example, we have what we call “cuves à toiles” situated backstage. Beneath a trapdoor measuring the entire width of the stage, there is a large space in which the rolled up backcloths are stored. This allows us to get them out and install them very quickly: a couple of stagehands attach them to ropes and others fly them up to the level of the stage. Just as it does today, at that time the Opéra had several productions on the go at once and it was important to be able to change the scenery every day. During the sixties, we began to use solid scenery with an architectural structure, which meant fewer painted backcloths and more three-dimensional objects. Naturally, we have to stock these items differently, either in cases or containers, of which we have over a thousand.

If scenery storage has evolved, then so has transport. I suppose at the time, backcloths were transported rolled up because of the paint. The medium used in the paint was made from animal gelatine which cracked if the cloth was folded. That’s why it was better to roll the backcloths, so as not to damage them; they were transported on foot because few carts had the capacity to carry the backcloths, which measured over twenty metres in length. However, since the second half of the 20^th century, painters have used vinyl or acrylic resins which adhere very well, even when diluted, and which are more flexible. This means we can fold our backcloths and store them in containers or on palettes in cases. Once they are hung on stage, the creases drop out. The evolution of ballet scenery is the combined result of various technical developments in artistic techniques, storage and finally transport. For more than a century, however, we have continued to use the old methods of storage for scenery like that for Giselle.

With the passing years, the backcloths for Giselle, which have been used time and again, have deteriorated and, in readiness for the May 2016 revival, we have repainted the cloths for Acts 1 and 2. Gisèle Rateau, Thierry Desserprit and Jean-Philippe Morillon, all painters employed in our workshops, have had the noble task of reproducing the originals. A copy of a photograph taken in 1905 showing one of these historic backcloths being carried on men’s backs has been on the workshop wall for as long as anyone can remember and is part of the landscape. Edouard Gouhier, the Technical Director in charge of the Palais Garnier and the Berthier workshops, seeing our three painters at work, had the idea of transporting one of the new backcloths in the time honoured fashion of a century ago. On 18^th October last year, 24 men and women, all volunteers from among our stage hands and workshop staff, took up the challenge and transported the canvas measuring 27 metres by 17 from the workshop to the Palais Garnier. The event was a source of much surprise amongst local inhabitants all the way from the Porte de Clichy to the 9^th Arrondissement and provided tangible evidence of the human and material investment that our work involves.

To my mind, this initiative also embodies the values that have prompted me to be a part of this adventure: firstly the passing on of skills, which is at the heart of what we do. The work of our painters, like those who painted that backcloth, is a skilled craft that will endure. Lots of stage sets require painting involving different materials, textures and patinas, but painted backcloths are becoming increasingly rare. It is only in large houses like ours, where the repertoire is rich enough to sustain craftsmanship of this kind, that painters get the opportunity to execute such work. This tradition is a warm tribute, then, to the crafts of the set decorators and to all the stagehands and technicians who bring their work to life, providing a light-hearted opportunity for members of staff whose paths ordinarily would not cross to work together. This collective endeavour has highlighted the solidarity between the different craftsmen of the Paris Opera.

We took the backcloth in through the main entrance of the theatre and carried it through the auditorium to the stage. The technicians attached it to a flybar and it was then ‘flown’ above the stage. Watching the backcloth gradually unrolling in the middle of that great, darkened space was a poignant experience. As a former scenery painter, I was very moved.”

José Sciuto was interviewed by Milena McCloskey

The set for Giselle makes its grand entrance in keeping with the affection born for it by Paris Opera craftsmen and audiences alike. Photographer and producer, David Luraschi, has immortalised this singular journey through the streets of Paris in his film Giselle: The Walking Landscape available now on the 3e Scène