October Arts Off 75: The Ghostly Spaces of the Stage

Over the relatively short span of my performing career, I was extraordinarily fortunate to dance many leading roles in the classical ballet canon including “Swan Lake,” “Sleeping Beauty” and of course that old holiday warhorse, “The Nutcracker.” Dance, I learned, is about characters, story and emotion. It is a living, breathing tradition that I am lucky enough to have carried through me.

Those gifts of artistry and depth from my dancing days shaped not only my career in movement, but also informed the second act of my life as a television host. It is an appreciation that will always live with me. So when I heard from Brandon Ragland, the newly appointed and dynamically charming artistic director of the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance, that he was programming “Giselle” for the 2025–2026 season, I was overjoyed.

Why the excitement? Well, “Giselle” is the one ballet that slipped through my fingers. I never had the chance to perform as Albrecht, the conflicted nobleman at the heart of the drama. Instead, I danced the role of Hilarion, the earthy forester who also loves Giselle, but whose jealousy helps set tragedy in motion. (Spoiler alert: Hilarion doesn’t make it out of Act II alive.) At the time, the leading roles were danced by the powerhouse duo Xiomara Reyes and José Manuel Carreño, principal dancers with American Ballet Theatre as guest artists for Gem City Ballet. With artists of that caliber in the room, you take second billing.

But here’s why “Giselle” still stirs my imagination all these years later: it’s one of the great ballets of the Romantic era, and one that seems destined for October. Premiered in 1841 at the Paris Opera, “Giselle” was choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, with a luminous, haunting score by Adolphe Adam. It quickly became a touchstone of 19th-century Romanticism, an art movement fascinated by nature, the supernatural and stories of tragic love.

This is where the ballet’s connection to Halloween shines. The first act unfolds in a pastoral village, where a fragile young woman named Giselle falls in love, only to discover betrayal. In the second act, we leave the warmth of daylight behind and enter a moonlit forest inhabited by the Wilis, ghostly brides who were betrayed before their wedding day and are doomed to rise from their graves to dance men to death. “Giselle” is essentially a Gothic romance in pointe shoes: innocence corrupted, madness, death, spirits returning to claim the living and ultimately a love that transcends the grave.

“Giselle” will be more than just a ballet for October audiences. It becomes a seasonal ritual, tapping into the same fascination with mortality and mystery that drives us to carve pumpkins and tell ghost stories. Imagine it: the flicker of stage light on tulle, the white-clad Wilis gliding across the stage like phantoms and Albrecht pleading desperately for forgiveness as the spirits close in. It’s chilling, beautiful, and utterly timeless. It reminds us that art, like autumn itself, often lives in the space between light and shadow.

As the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance puts on this production this fall, audiences will get to experience not just one of ballet’s most beloved works, but one that feels perfectly timed for our season of falling leaves, flickering candles, and stories whispered in the dark. And for me, it’s a chance to reflect on the strange beauty of the paths not taken, the roles missed and the dances left unperformed. Perhaps that’s the true lesson of “Giselle,” that even in absence, in loss, in the ghostly spaces between what was and what might have been, there is still grace, still artistry, still something to be learned.

Rodney Veal
CET and Think^TV Producer and Community Arts Liaison