Works by Bel / Lander / Robbins Showcase Rising Stars at Paris Opera Ballet

By Patricia Boccadoro

PARIS, 1 December 2004—The season at the Palais Garnier opened with an ambitious programme intended to help the audience better understand a dancer's art. It began brilliantly with Harald Lander's Etudes, a theatrical staging of a ballet class to music by Czerny, a work which has become a showpiece for companies around the world. Few ballets contain such an elegant demonstration of classical technique, and since the French company possesses a female corps de ballet comprising some of the most gifted and impeccably trained young dancers in the world today, many movements were danced almost to perfection.

A glittering pleiade of youngsters, including Mathilde Froustey, gold medallist at Varna, Sarah Kora Dayanova, gold medallist at Lausanne, and Aurore Cordellier, gold medallist at the Paris International Competition, to name but the first three I noticed, were shown practicing at the barre. The company demonstrated both slow and rapid exercises leading to more intricate steps of increasing difficulty until the arrival of three étoiles, Agnès Letestu, José Martinez and Nicolas Le Riche for the grand finale. If the corps de ballet were not quite so crisp and homogenous as they have been in the past, and if Le Riche and Martinez, not quite at the peak of their form, pained over the jumps, Agnès Letestu, sumptuous, elevated the work, and carried it into the highest realms of pure dance. As the little Sylphide, she was romantic yet spiritual transforming the technique we had previously seen into art.

Dorothée Gilbert
Photo: ICARE

In a second cast, Manuel Legris, a superb classicist, danced with style and intelligence partnering twenty-year-old Dorothée Gilbert. Her astonishing technique together with her freshness and charm promise much in the future. Benjamin Pech, laborious, was the third soloist.

Glass Pieces, a work created in 1983 for forty dancers, and first interpreted by the French company in 1991, is a Robbins' masterpiece; the more one sees it the more one wants to see it again. Set to a most attractive and haunting score by Philip Glass, (and hence its name ), the work is also a masterly demonstration of classical technique as seen by the creator of West Side Story.

Emilie Cozette and Stéphane Bullion in Glass Pieces
Photo: ICARE

There's no narrative; groups of dancers move across the stage, following the structure of the music, more repetitive than "minimalist". When the music stops, they stop, and then they start moving again, changing direction. There's an underlying violence as an anonymous crowd cross and re-cross the stage. Marie-Agnès Gillot, strong and quite magnificent in the central role was partnered by Kader Belarbi. However, the revelation came in another cast I saw, when Emilie Cozette, tall, slender, and beautiful, was partnered for a matinée performance by Stéphane Bullion and by Yann Bridard in the evening.

"Evidently, Robbins is one of my favourite choreographers, and this role is very special to me", she told me the following day. "I first saw Agnès Letestu dance in the ballet when I was 12, and it was a work I couldn't get out of my mind. The music ensnared me, and I dreamed of dancing it one day, even as one of the shadows behind. There's a very strong force present and an exchange with your partner which is at the time both powerful and calming. When I danced it the second time, something magical happened and I found I was simply carried away by the music and the choreography.

"I worked with Jean-Pierre Frohlich, a member of the Robbins Rights Trust, who emphasised the purity of the choreography. All the lines speak for themselves, and I had no need to add anything of my own.".

Paris Opera Ballet
Photo: ICARE

Nothing maybe, excepting her own luminosity, when, mysterious and inaccessible, Emilie Cozette made time stand still.

Sandwiched between these two wonderful works was Véronique Doisneau, conception Jérome Bel, a piece based upon the life of Véronique Doiseau, a dancer in the corps de ballet. She came on stage in her practice clothes carrying a half-empty bottle of water, and for the next thirty minutes, proceeded to tell us about herself. She told us she was 41, had two children aged 5 and 11, earned 3,500 euros a month, and enjoyed dancing in Rudolf Nureyev's ballets, but not those of Béjart. From time to time, she punctuated her monologue with a short illustration of her repertoire.

Maybe it was amusing for her friends and family and to a handful of people intimately connected with the dance world, but it was without any interest for the general public, many of whom were foreigners and didn't understand a word. After about six or seven minutes of it, a small girl howled that it wasn't dance and that she wanted to go home, a feeling that everyone around me shared. Maybe such a piece of non-dance could be shown, in the amphitheatre of the Bastille for example, but at the Palais Garnier it was mis-placed.
.