Akram Khan's Giselle

Akram Khan's reimagining of Giselle is one of the most celebrated and consequential ballets of the twenty-first century — a radical recontextualisation of the Romantic classic that transplants its story into the world of displaced migrant workers and reimagines its supernatural second act as something at once more elemental and more urgent than the original Wilis. Created for English National Ballet and premiered in 2016, the work won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance and has since toured internationally to thunderous acclaim.

Khan places his Giselle at the bottom of the social hierarchy — a worker in a garment factory, one of the exploited migrant labourers who are cast out when they can no longer work or when they transgress the rules of the community. The division between the privileged factory owners (the Landlords) and the workers mirrors the class division of Adolphe Adam's original between the nobility and the peasantry, but carries a visceral contemporary charge. When Giselle dies — here from a brutal expulsion from the community rather than a broken heart — she crosses into a world of the abandoned dead that haunts the living with terrifying purpose.

Khan's choreography fuses his classical Indian kathak training with contemporary movement and elements of classical ballet vocabulary, creating a physical language unlike anything else in the repertoire. The movement is dense and searching, the use of the floor and ground level particularly distinctive, and the relationship between Giselle and Albrecht is charged with a desperate, clinging intensity that makes their tragedy feel genuinely modern.

Vincenzo Lamagna's score reimagines Adam's original music in darker, more industrial colours, incorporating electronic textures and folk-inflected passages. The result is a Giselle for our times — one that preserves the original's emotional core while making its social critique unmissably explicit.