Giselle by Staatsballett Berlin
A story told entirely in gesture, in a room where phones no longer wait for the final bow.
🩰 Giselle
🎶 Adolphe Adam, 1841
💭 Patrice Bart, 2000
🏛️ Staatsballett Berlin / Staatsoper Berlin
🗓️ 18.09.2026
What I love most about classical ballet is how much attention it requires when watching from the audience. After all, a story is being told only through music and dance - no words whatsoever. Meaning that every gesture is deliberate: we follow the plot and its context through hands, faces, and turns of the head. Giselle opens with an obvious one: Albrecht throws off his lush crimson cape as he leaves behind his royal identity to cosplay as a peasant. It’s just a quick moment, but essential to understanding the story and its devastation.
Which makes classical ballet a sort of anti-Netflix: timeless, allegorical stories which require precise attention vs. a movie-making assembly line that has literally started verbalizing plot progression and context clues through character dialogue so that people can follow a movie only by listening - since their visual attention is on their phones.
At the risk of sounding scolding: this Netflix effect has reached ballet and opera audiences. I find that each season, attention spans get noticeably shorter as phone usage increases - notification lights here, flash photography there, the occasional dropped phone. At one point, the woman next to me at Giselle was full-on texting ChatGPT. Girl what?
These stories are timeless! And they’re relevant! Giselle loses her mind over a situationship and dies of heartbreak - now if that’s not relatable?? But staged art, be it theatre, ballet, or opera, is meant to pull us out of reality for a moment, to invite a brief suspension of disbelief. How do you give a 185-year-old ballet that attention when real life is a phone screen away?
And I understand the impulse to document. I still regret not taking a photo of the staging at the last La Gioconda at Deutsche Oper in 2024, in the original set from 1876 (!!), which will probably never be on stage again. It took effort not to sneak a photo in the moment, but here’s the thing: classical live performances are some of the last spaces that have remained phone-free (until the final applause), and there’s something sacred about that.
Cast 18.09.
Choreography and Staging Patrice Bart
Stage and Costume Design Peter Farmer
Lighting Design Franz Peter David
Dramaturgy Christiane Theobald
Assistant to the Choreographer Claude de Vulpian
Staged by Raffaella Renzi
Bühnenbildassistenz Gerd Neubert
Musical Direction Robert Reimer
Staatskapelle Berlin
Giselle Haruka Sassa
Albrecht David Soares
Myrtha Vera Segova
Hilarion Giovanni Princic
Peasant Pas de Deux Meiri Maeda / Murilo de Oliveira
