In Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Giselle for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre there are no pretty peasants on pointes and no picturesque rustic cottages. What you get instead is a small Irish rural community thriving on poisonous gossip, petty jealousy and highly repressed sexual urges. The heroine, too, is not the quintessential embodiment of any Romantic female ideal. A total outcast suffering from asthma, she lost her voice the day she found out that her mother had hanged herself. Her father, an omnipresent lunatic narrator, lives on top of the electric pole that dominates, like a gigantic cross/totem, the village, represented by shifting props on a barren wooden platform.
Giselle’s brother, Hilarion, is a deranged, incestuous rapist who indulges in all sorts of violence against defenceless creatures, much like the protagonist of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory. Like his sister, he has been named after a classical ballet character by their mother, a disillusioned aspiring ballerina. Stripped of any aristocratic status, Giselle’s beloved Albrecht becomes here a bisexual line-dancing teacher from Bratislava. It is the discovery of his sexual activities with the local butcher, the most eligible bachelor in town, that causes Giselle’s death. And there is no traditional mad scene; the girl dies because what she sees triggers an asthmatic crisis and her inhaler is nowhere to be found.
This Giselle is not one of those shallow revisitations aimed solely at shocking traditionalist old fogeys, though. This quirkily provocative one-acter of pure dance-theatre is an abrasive satire on moral and social beliefs in rural Ireland which benefits from a deeply considered analysis of the 1841 ballet narrative. The script is packed with the F-word, and intercourse — both hetero- and homosexual — is graphically depicted on stage.
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