This Giselle, created for the Opéra national du Rhin, begins with the same relational architecture as Adolphe Adam's 1841 ballet. A woman falls in love with someone who has deceived her. He is committed to another. The deception is revealed. Grief follows. The question of forgiveness arises.

Working with dramaturge Ulrike Wörner von Faßmann, we kept these human premises but asked how these relationships might unfold with contemporary agency. Not judging the original for its time, but recognizing that staging it today inevitably confronts our present society and current social discourses.

To perform these relationships now is to engage with contemporary questions about power, consent, and agency, whether we choose to consciously or not. We chose to engage consciously. The original Giselle gave voice to women within the constraints of its moment. The ballet centers a female protagonist, her emotional journey, her transformation. That was significant in 1841, even as the voice it offered remained shaped by the structures it emerged from. Dance historian Marian Smith documents how the Paris Opéra ran a system of "light prostitution" where male patrons accessed ballerinas backstage, many too poor to afford food and housing without external income.

The ballet's plot mirrors this reality. Albrecht deceives Giselle while engaged to Bathilde, and the story grants him absolution for both betrayals. Smith writes that the Opéra "offered men both a temptation and a kind of ballet plot that offered absolution for giving in to it." Our Giselle honors that original voice while asking what it might say with greater freedom. Would Giselle find the strength to overcome her grief without seeking death? Would Albrecht, a narcissistic manipulator using women for his own pleasure, find forgiveness and clemency from both Giselle and Bathilde? Would Bathilde remain conciliatory about her fiancé's romantic escapades? Could Hilarion finally confess his love to Giselle? How has Myrtha's experience of betrayal transformed her? These questions guided every choreographic choice. The answers aren't predetermined. They emerge through movement, through the dancers' bodies making decisions the original libretto denied them.

The feminist intervention extends beyond choreography into the score itself. Alongside Adolphe Adam's familiar music, I integrated compositions by Louise Farrenc, a major 19th-century composer systematically erased from the canon. Her presence in the score isn't decorative. It's structural, a female voice literally woven into the musical fabric of a ballet that originally silenced women even as it claimed to center them.

As a male choreographer working on a feminist reinterpretation, the inquiry couldn't stop at the libretto. It extended into the studio itself, into questions about my own practice. How do I represent women's bodies on stage? What technical demands am I making and why? How does power operate in the choreographic process? What does it mean to "give voice" to female protagonists when the authority creating that voice is male? These questions disrupted my approach to everything connected to choreography, directly or indirectly. The work changed how I think about genre representation on stage, about technique, about studio dynamics. From a personal perspective, it transformed certainties I had considered normal and acquired. The feminist framework demanded accountability at every level. Yet this Giselle, while embodying the freedom of its female protagonists, reaches beyond critique to rediscover romanticism's foundation in the expression of love. Perhaps this is where everyone's common denominator resides. The search for happiness and personal fulfillment in love. Love of the other, whatever their gender and orientation. Self-love and respect for others.

"My beautiful ideal is freedom, the right to express oneself for everyone, and for everyone the right to enjoy beautiful things." These words from Emma Goldman, anarchist and feminist, could describe any liberation struggle. Her ideal was awkwardly paraphrased as "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution" when she was told that dancing "with such irresponsible abandon" didn't suit an agitator. This freedom, dear to Goldman and so many others, is the freedom to love, to enjoy one's body, to dance as we see fit, without patriarchal, institutional, political, or religious authority dictating to those it wishes to submit what they must do and how they must do it.

To be free to love. To be free to be loved. And love to be free.