#Roland cut studio update series#
His impact on the French ballet scene began early, when at 21 he left the Paris Opera Ballet to create a series of ballets organized by the critic Irène Lidova and Boris Kochno, formerly secretary to the great ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev.Ī Diaghilevian spirit of collaboration and a distinctive theatrical flair marked Petit from the outset. Petit effectively pushed postwar French ballet into a new era, leaving behind the princes and swan queens of the 19th century to create 20th-century characters who seemed radically modern and fresh. Outside France, little of Petit’s oeuvre is performed, and that little tends to be in Russia, perhaps because the large-scale theatrics and visual power of Petit’s work are reminiscent of Soviet-era pieces like “Spartacus.” Theatricality and visual impact are the objectives the corps is deployed almost entirely for visual effect in “Notre-Dame.” Petit never bothered with corps de ballet work “more than as a salad around a lobster,” as the ballerina Violette Verdy, a member of Petit’s early companies, said in Meredith Daneman’s biography of Margot Fonteyn.
Petit is a clear, effective dance storyteller partly because he doesn’t muddy the waters with complex characterization or relationships instead, he distills narrative to its essentials, often blending realism and fantasy. And as in “Carmen,” the characters of “Notre-Dame” aren’t burdened with profound psychological depths, or historical veracity. Much like the well known shorter works, the setting of the ballet is abstracted the décor, by René Allio, suggests the stained-glass frontage of its namesake cathedral at a later point huge bells (from which Quasimodo swings) tell us we are inside. It’s all highly enjoyable once you let go of any desire for narrative or period accuracy. This isn’t Victor Hugo’s Paris anymore, but a stylized world that mingles 1960s chic, music hall and grand spectacle. They hold their arms out at right angles, fingers splayed, moving forward with ungainly frog-legged stomps. Couples cross the darkened stage at a stately pace, their faces obscured by huge headdresses, their cream cloaks sweeping behind them in the sepulchral gloom.īut then the lights come up strongly, revealing lines of dancers in short, bright, decidedly not-period costumes by Yves Saint Laurent, their eyes ghoulishly darkened. Its opening scene suggests a conventional story ballet set in the medieval era of the Victor Hugo novel that it’s based on. “Notre-Dame” has much in common with his famous shorter pieces. “It’s our responsibility to keep his works alive.” “He was a visionary choreographer who created roles that could change you artistically, aesthetically, technically, as a dancer,” said Aurélie Dupont, the director of the Paris Opera Ballet. He is regarded as an important creator of story ballets, like the British Kenneth MacMillan - both fervent believers in narrative ballet (an unfashionable stance in the 1960s) that could incorporate modern ideas about sexuality and depravity. It’s a curious schism: Despite the relative obscurity of much of Petit’s work, he remains much-revered in France, where he is still described as a great choreographer who is pivotal to a French ballet heritage. Those two pieces, along with “Les Rendez-Vous” (1945), make up the second Paris Opera program, which will open (pandemic permitting) on May 30, giving Parisian audiences a sampler of Petit’s greatest hits. Like most ballet-lovers living outside of France, I knew little of Petit’s large oeuvre apart from the two works that made him famous: “Carmen” (1949) and “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort” (1946), which got a particular boost when Mikhail Baryshnikov performed it in the opening scene of the 1985 movie, “White Nights.” The company performs it intermittently, but I had never seen it.
I was curious about “Notre-Dame,” a work that Petit (1924-2011) created for the Paris Opera in 1965.
(It will be broadcast later in the summer.) The performance that I saw was being filmed, watched by a handful of journalists and Paris Opera employees. But a new lockdown in France obliged the company to cancel all its shows. It was April 1, two days after the scheduled opening night of Roland Petit’s “Notre-Dame de Paris,” the first of two Paris Opera Ballet programs commemorating the 10th anniversary of Petit’s death. PARIS - The huge Opéra Bastille was strangely quiet, the clatter of the musicians settling in to the orchestra pit echoing in the nearly empty theater.
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