Albrecht Comes Home

Antonijevic as Albrecht for the National Ballet of Canada.

Aleksandar Antonijevic has waited a lifetime to come home to Giselle. Born and trained in Novi Sad but never once invited to dance in his hometown during a stellar international career, the former National Ballet of Canada principal returns now as the author of a new full‑length Giselle for the Serbian National Theatre’s ballet company. The engagement has already broken box‑office records, with the first run of performances on March 28, 30, and 31 sold out in advance and the city plastered with posters of Žizela, as the ballet is called in Serbian, bearing his name as choreographer. For a Canadian artist who has spent more than three decades living and working in Toronto, the work is both a personal reckoning and a sign of where Canadian ballet talent travels when it is underused at home.

This Giselle did not begin as a passion project. It began with a phone call. About a year and a half ago, Belgrade Dance Festival director and former ballerina Aja Jung took over the ballet at the Serbian National Theatre, and, as Antonijevic tells it, “I was her first call.” She brought him in repeatedly as a coach, asked him to help restructure the company, and together they made hard decisions about auditions, promotions, and retirements. For a dancer who “really wanted my family to see me” and once discovered through a local newspaper that his long‑dreamed‑of hometown Giselle performances had been cancelled—ostensibly “for lack of pointe shoes”—being invited back in a position of real influence has felt almost radical.

That feeling only deepened when Jung decided the company’s existing Giselle, based on a ballet first performed in Paris in 1841, was “very old‑fashioned” and asked whether he would create a new one. He had never choreographed before and was stunned. “If not now, then when?” he remembers thinking, as he pondered his answer. “Why not jump off a cliff and just go on this journey and see what happens.”

Antonijevic as Albrecht for the National Ballet of Canada, with ballerina Greta Hodgkinson.

He could only have taken such a leap with Giselle, a ballet that has shaped his 35-year career. Antonijevic has danced Albrecht, the ballet’s male lead, since he was 17, first as his graduation role, later in Sir Peter Wright’s production at the National Ballet of Canada and with Russian coaches earlier on—Giselle is written into his body. He is frank about the impossibility of doing something entirely new—“everyone under the sun has done a version, including people who have completely deconstructed it”—and he cites Mats Ek’s asylum‑set Giselle and Akram Khan’s contemporary retelling for English National Ballet as landmarks he wouldn’t dream of deposing. His own approach is not conceptual shock but a tightening of classical values. “My vocabulary for this show is very classically based, very traditional,” he says.

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“I have huge respect for classical ballet in a pure form, and I think it needs guardians. It needs to be done at a certain level where it doesn’t seem unnecessary in the world today.” —Aleksandar Antonijevic

 

The gamble lies in how he tells the story. While preparing the production, he has worked with the Novi Sad dancers as if they were a theatre ensemble, probing how they stand, how they look at one another, insisting that even a corps member knows exactly which villager they are. The village is no longer a line of stock peasants arranged in front of painted cottages. The staging is stripped of quaint houses and decorative clutter, and the storytelling is shaped “almost like a play.”

His second career as a photographer, begun after his 2014 retirement from the National Ballet, sharpens that interpretation. Dancers, he points out, spend their lives studying still images of themselves in the mirror, chasing a perfect angle for an imagined spectator sitting directly in front of them. “When I picked up the camera, it was exactly the same sensation,” he says. Years of composing bodies and faces in space inform how he blocks a pas de deux or fills a stage picture, and his sense of line and focus extends into the projected environments he has developed with his team. The projections in Giselle are “slightly abstract” yet rooted in the woods and nocturnal world of the ballet: they suggest atmosphere rather than dictate it. Just as important is the way he uses his photographer’s eye in the studio. He tries to strip away “all the extra things that dancers like to put on” for the lens, building an atmosphere of safety where they can bring “a certain inner life” to both performance and image.

If the steps are classical, the themes feel uncomfortably current. Antonijevic brushes aside the familiar anxiety about whether ballet is still relevant. The plot of Giselle—love, betrayal, madness, forgiveness—strikes him as painfully contemporary in an era of powerful men who appear to escape consequences even as they bring the world to the brink of all-out war. He also worries about a generation that struggles to look each other in the eye, including dancers in rehearsal, their attention fractured by screens and extended time on social media. A romantic‑era classic such as Giselle, staged “with sophistication and quality and excellence,” can still take viewers on a journey that demands sustained attention and emotional risk. In Novi Sad, he has tried to make that journey tangible for the dancers as much as the audience, pushing them toward the self‑interrogation he believes the art form requires.

The homecoming has another dimension: the company itself. Antonijevic speaks candidly about past frustrations with the Serbian ballet: indifference, cancellations, a sense of not being wanted. Jung’s arrival and her ambition to take the company onto the international stage have changed that picture. He is no longer the outsider hoping for a guest slot but the person in the room every day, guiding how the dancers work.

“The biggest joy is being in the studio and helping young artists to understand what kind of commitment this art form requires,” he says. Crucially, he wants them to know “they are seen,” particularly the youngest dancers who are easily overlooked in the press to sell tickets and service stars. He has spent almost a year in Europe recently, as his coaching and staging work there gains traction, and he credits his close association with New York City Ballet artist-in-residence Alexei Ratmansky for reinforcing a no‑compromise attitude: even on the hardest days, he says, an artist can be asked for more and be better than they imagined they could be.

For Giselle, he has surrounded himself with collaborators who share that seriousness. When he considered costumes, he immediately thought of fashion designer Zoran Dobric, a fellow Serbian who, like Antonijevic, left the former Yugoslavia in the shadow of war and built a career abroad. Dobric, who fled Croatia when it became unsafe to stay, passed through London and Toronto, and now teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, brings an “impeccable aesthetic and very defined voice” shaped by geometry and folk motifs. Dobric has drawn on a 14th‑century palette and silhouette for this production, designing shorter tutus in Act I and longer skirts in Act II that read unmistakably as ballet while carrying “a touch of fashion” in their cut, pattern, and colour. The creative partnership, Antonijevic says, has been genuinely two‑way, the kind of detailed back‑and‑forth that lets the visual world grow organically from the choreography rather than sit on top of it.

The casting carries a similar voltage. When Antonijevic learned that Royal Ballet superstar Marianela Nuñez would be his first Giselle in Novi Sad, he “almost fell off the chair.” The coup is Jung’s: she knows the European circuit and used those connections to secure a ballerina who has danced the role for years to critical acclaim. He and Nuñez have never worked together before, but they share a history in Wright’s Giselle—hers in London, his in Toronto—and he is eager to see what she brings to a version that honours that lineage while recalibrating it for a different stage and a different generation of dancers. Reviewers from London, Munich, Milan, and Rome are expected in the house on opening night, underlining the extent to which this is no provincial experiment but a debut designed to be seen and judged on a broader European stage.

For Canada, Giselle is a reminder of how far the country’s dancers and dance makers can travel—and where their talents are sometimes recognized first. Antonijević is clear‑eyed about the irony that “here at home in Toronto, it seems that my knowledge is not needed anywhere in Canada in general,” even as his ballet work in Europe takes off. Yet he still speaks as a Canadian citizen who has given his career to the National Ballet of Canada and hopes people here will feel proud that “one of their own is representing them internationally in a dignified way.”

Whether this new presentation of Giselle is later captured on film or seen only in the moment, it stands as a high‑stakes, high‑style meeting of past and present: a classical ballet that keeps faith with its vocabulary, told by an artist finally allowed to return to the role—and the city—that made him.

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