Attitudes - Paris Opera Ballet

Dance Magazine, June, 2003 by Clive Barnes

When nearly forty years ago I switched (overnight and a subsequent lifetime) from being a native Londoner to become an immigrant New Yorker, I knew that one of the things I would miss most about London would be Paris, and what is nowadays their tunnel-blessed proximity. What I didn't know was that one of the things I would miss most about Paris was the Paris Opera Ballet. And this is not simply because I am a Francophile, although I am; it's more a reflection of the important place the Paris Opera Ballet occupies in world classic dance.

No, the repertoire is not as fascinating as New York City Ballet's, or even as individual as The Royal Ballet's--for one thing, the Paris Opera Ballet has for centuries not had a major choreographer to call its own. Its traditions are not as securely preserved as the Royal Danes', nor are its male dancers as strong as those of American Ballet Theatre or its women as strong as the Kirov's. But the Paris Opera Ballet is a fantastic company. It was not always so.

I first encountered the company on my first trip to Paris, in 1949. I was already not young--well, not that young. And I was already a sophisticated dance aficionado (actually, over-sophisticated) and emerging dance critic (although, armed with industrial-strength binoculars, I was still paying for my own tickets in the farthest, cheapest reaches of theaters). The company did not impress me overmuch--it seemed infinitely less interesting than the various independent troupes of Roland Petit and Boris Kochno. In fact, apart from my first sight of Symphony in C (with the original Paris east minus Tamara Toumanova) under its French nom de guerre of Le Palais de cristal, and with those fancy Leonor Fini designs, I was totally underwhelmed. I stubbornly remained so on many later occasions.

Even a two-week immersion season by the company at Covent Garden in 1954 (my diaries note that I saw eighteen ballets, mostly by Serge Lifar, spread over fourteen performances) did nothing to make me a fan, despite the presence of both the wondrous Yvette Chauvire and the lustrous Nina Vyroubova, two of my most beloved ballerinas of the twentieth century. Subsequently, when in Paris I would go to the company as a mild evening relaxation. Journalistically I at least made copy out of, say, John Cranko's 1955 La Belle Helene (underrated, by the way) or Gene Kelly's 1960 Gershwin piece Pas de Dieux (Claude Bessy was divine, but Jerry Lewis could have done better choreography) or Pierre Lacotte's 1972 adequate reconstruction of La Sylphide (not as good, I thought, as Victor Gsovsky's earlier attempt for Petit), but my rating of the company among the majors was pretty much the lowest of the low.

By now the troupe was involved in a succession of directors. There were fine dancers, but no company. I caught the occasional "event"--Helgi Tomasson's guest debut as Albrecht in Giselle, for example, or the revival of Yuri Grigorovich's Ivan the Terrible, with the marvelous Jean Guizerix (a great Robbins interpreter, by the way), Dominique Khalfouni and, also a favorite at ABT, Michael Denard. Yet I still didn't take Paris's dancers as seriously as its cooking until I had an awakening in October 1977.

Every year the Paris Opera holds promotion examinations for its dancers--apart from the etoiles and the senior soloists--with a jury consisting of the Paris Opera administration, a delegation of dancers, and a few foreign outsiders, who in 1977 consisted of Kenneth MacMillan, Asaf Messerer, and myself. I realized that since Bessy had taken control of the ballet school some five years earlier, the standard of the younger dancers had risen. But seeing them en masse was an extraordinary experience. Bessy and her teachers had formed a troupe to reckon with--an instrument for dance.

It is Rudolf Nureyev who, rightly so, is given the credit for pushing the POB into the first rank. His inspiration, with his prescient promotions and his inculcation ora sense of style but even more aspiration, was vital. But the dancers were there before Nureyev took command of the company in 1983, and they remained after his resignation in 1989. And they are there today, even though the school, to judge from its appearance in New York last year, is not currently producing dancers of the quality of Bessy's earlier years.

No real matter--the students will improve again. And the company, as I saw in Paris at the beginning of the year, catching two performances of Lacotte's pallid restaging of Paquita at the Palais Gamier, and at the Opera Bastille a strike-struck, virtually scenery-less, revival of John Neumeier's imaginative Sylvia (but bring back the Ashton and give it to the French!), is still that same marvelous instrument. I've never been much enamored of Agnes Letestu and Jose Martinez, but their alternates in the leading roles in Paquita, the glistening Clairemarie Osta and the elegant Jean-Guillaume Bart, were superb. In Sylvia, Eleonora Abbagnato, Delphine Moussin, Nicolas Le Riche, and Manuel Legris showed just that style, spirit, and sheer technique that has made today's Paris Opera Ballet one of the wonders of the dance world. I miss Paris--and nowadays the dancers as much as the city.