Tag: Paris Opera Ballet

Roland Petit

Roland PetitRoland Petit, a choreographer in post-WWII ballet, was responsible for defining a new French chic and erotic frankness in dance, creating many roles for his wife, Zizi Jeanmaire. With July 2013 the second anniversary of his death, there has recently been a Moscow Stanislavsky production of Petit’s Coppélia, receiving mixed reviews.

Born in 1924 Paris, Petit began as a classical dancer but rebelled against the traditionalism of the Paris Opera Ballet. By 25, he had created two of his most iconic ballets, Le jeune homme et la mort and Carmen, for which he is perhaps most well-known and popular. The ballets caused a sensation worldwide and Petit became an exciting name in French dance.

Petit was accepted at the Paris Opera Ballet aged 16. He was promoted to soloist by the director Serge Lifar (Diaghilev’s last protégé), and was taken under the wing of two leading Diaghilev associates who influenced Petit by the cosmopolitan artistic post-war Paris. At 21 Petit founded Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées and reinvented the ‘suffering, virginal ballerina’ as a provocative, irresistible femme fatale; other post-war work includes Les Forains,  Les demoiselles de la nuit (for Margot Fonteyn), Le Loup, Cyrano de Bergerac and Notre-Dame de Paris, which still remain today.  Aside from the world of ballet, Petit charmed Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth in 1955 Hollywood, and went on to choreograph the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs, Hans Christian Andersen, The Glass Slipper, Black Tights, and Folies-Bergère.

Petit returned to the Paris Opera Ballet as director in 1970 for a few months, and 1972 saw him take leadership of the Ballet de Marseille and produce the world’s major ballerinas for the following 25 years, such as Maya Plisetskaya and Natalia Makarova. Petit left Marseille in 1998 and withdrew all his ballets when he learnt of his successor, going on to travel widely, creating ballets and mounting old works for companies in Paris, Tokyo, Moscow and St Petersburg, South Africa, Italy and Beijing, having created over 170 ballets.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Paris Opera Ballet’s New Director

Opera National de Paris LogoIt has been announced that the Paris Opera Ballet will be taken over by Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer and a former principal at New York City Ballet, in September 2014. The previous director, Brigitte Lefèvre, will retire at the end of the 2013-14 season after nearly ten years at the top.

Millepied trained at the Lyon Conservatory, going on to join the School of American Ballet. His professional career as a dancer was spent with New York City Ballet, where quickly became a principal dancer in 2002. He then retired in 2011 in order to focus on choreography, and founded the L.A. Dance Project last year.

2014 will see Millepied inherit one of the world’s greatest classical companies, complete with 150 talented and tutu clad dancers, and a fantastic history: the company is the result of the very beginnings of ballet at Louis XIV’s court. The dancers of the company almost all come from the Paris Opera Ballet school, and they rarely leave to dance elsewhere once they have achieved a position in the company.

Millepied has had much professional experience. He has created touring groups, and has organised choreographic projects and festivals with musicians and artists. As a choreographer he has created works for major companies which include American Ballet Theatre, NYCB and the Paris Opera Ballet, and has also worked on Black Swan, the blockbuster film. Millepied has created two works for the Paris Opera Ballet and has a third commissioned for next season, ahead of his role as director. When he does step into the role, he will maintain a strong focus on contemporary ballet repertory for the classical company in order to develop a new identity and develop in-house choreographic talent, similar to Tamara Rojo’s aim at English National Ballet.

The future of ballet looks set for a lot of evolutionising!