Akram Khan’s Giselle: a ballet about being moved

English National Ballet at London Coliseum
January 15, 2026

There is a moment, late in Akram Khan’s Giselle, when the wall moves and the human figure does not. The stage expands, the light thins, and Albrecht is reduced to a silhouette pinned against an environment that feels infinite. It is a cinematic trick, yet it lands with brutal simplicity. In this world, the set does not support the story. It swallows it.

Khan’s Giselle relocates the ballet to a landscape of labour and inequality. The Outcasts are migrant garment workers, pushed behind a wall and summoned to perform for the Landlords who own the factory and the future. Tim Yip’s design makes that divide physical. There are several walls, each with its own mood: a grey-white surface stamped with handprints, like a record of bodies counted and erased; a towering structure that reads like the inside of a well, ladders offering movement without release; the great rotating barrier that flips and re-flips, as if borders are never stable, only managed; and finally, a plain, rough wall, uneven to the touch even from a distance, where the story ends with no ornament left, only consequence.

The choreography mirrors that architecture. The ensemble dominates the evening, surging in dense clusters, breaking into frantic runs that feel animalistic, bodies charging with herd logic. Movement repeats, repeats, repeats, until it becomes atmosphere. The effect is deliberate. This is dance as pressure, not dance as decoration.

At its most visceral, that pressure turns into a kind of collective appetite. When Giselle is exposed, the Outcasts gather around her in a three-layered circle, arms hooked over each other’s shoulders. The ring rises and falls, pulsing, swelling, contracting, like a strange mouth. It does not simply surround her. It consumes her. The image lingers as one of the production’s most unsettling ideas: grief as a community force, love as something the crowd can crush.

Vincenzo Lamagna’s score amplifies the sense of force. It is loud, contemporary, insistently percussive, with crescendos that push the air out of the auditorium. The sound closes around you, locking you inside the machine.

Mark Henderson’s lighting often keeps the stage in darkness. The gloom fits the production’s politics, but it also withholds detail. At times the orchestra pit feels brighter than the world above it, and faces slip out of reach. It is telling that I only register the pale blue of Giselle’s skirt at the curtain call. Earlier on, in the murk, costumes blur into one another and character distinctions do too.

In the central role, Emily Suzuki dances Giselle with clarity and poise. She is beautiful to watch, and technically secure, yet the love story rarely takes root in her body. Her Giselle often feels lost within the scale of the production, a figure carried by the current rather than generating it. James Streeter’s Albrecht, meanwhile, never fully becomes an emotional anchor. Their scenes share space, but not always breath. Curiously, the strongest charge sometimes sits elsewhere, in the confrontations where power comes into focus.

That is where Ken Saruhashi’s Hilarion comes in, a fixer who moves between worlds with a grin that never quite reads as harmless. He carries a sly, streetwise energy, the kind that makes you want to keep your distance, and the performance lets that unpleasantness do its work. When the violence arrives, it feels less like a twist than a bill coming due.

Act II brings the Wilis, a battle-hardened female underworld led by Emma Hawes as Myrtha. Their long staves read immediately as ritual weapons, an extension of collective control. The patterns are precise, the threat unmistakable. With the long skirts, the loose hair, and the dim light, the atmosphere slips into the spectral. When they glide forward in bourrée, the stage acquires that classic ballet horror: not the scream of a monster, but the chill of something that moves too smoothly to be alive.

Ten years on, Khan’s Giselle remains a striking piece of dance theatre. Its images stay in the mind: walls turning, hands imprinted, bodies running as if chased by history itself. Yet for all its conceptual clarity, the production can feel emotionally sealed. It offers scale, structure, and a world built to crush the individual. What it gives less consistently, at least on this performance, is the fragile heat of two people falling in love inside that world.

What strikes me most is the logic of captivity. One cage opens. Another closes. In life, Giselle belongs to the Outcasts behind the wall. In death, she is absorbed into Myrtha’s regimented underworld. Even the afterlife offers no freedom, only a different choreography of obedience. In this Giselle, death is not release. It is relocation.