Half-hearted return for the Paris Opera Ballet with Forsythe / Inger

The Paris Opera Ballet returns with the double bill Forsythe / Inger, a program combining two new pieces in the company’s repertoire and the revival of Blake Works I. The evening of Thursday, October 10 was also marked by the farewell of star dancer Laura Hecquet, celebrated at the end of the Ballet parade. A modest way of withdrawing from the stage, as much as a strange start to a show, with bows to an audience who had not yet seen anything. Furthermore, the orchestra, present only to play The March of the Trojans by Berlioz for the parade, then gave way to the sound system of the Opéra Garnier, spitting out recorded music of varying quality, and thus creating a certain frustration. Fortunately, some virtuoso performances by dancers still enchanted this subdued evening.

Fortunately unscheduled most evenings, Word for Worda twelve-minute marketing clip in Chanel costumes intended for Instagram rather than art and signed My’Kal Stromile to the unlistenable music of Jerome Begin, extends the gala and the Ballet parade. Five dancers, dressed in pink tutus and jackets embroidered with gold thread of “Lagerfeld Gothic” inspiration, develop some perfectly forgettable neoclassical movements in the Second Empire decorum of Garnier’s expanded stage, something we had already seen several times.

The show really starts from the second part, carried by two choreographies by William Forsythe. Rearrayan experimental work created in 2011 for the star duo formed by Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche, is transposed into a new trio version. This “rearrangement” of the piece, whose very name bears the notion of making and undoing, is a research into the hazard of form, with some semi-improvisational passages. The role of the dancer is thus duplicated in this new version, which revolves around the repetition of the same sequence of unbalanced and choppy movements by a dancer, dressed as in training. Music and light jump, we stop and start again. Roxane Stojanov, who inherits the heavy task of dancing Sylvie Guillem, in visibly conscientious work, is superbly slender and suspended. At his side, Takeru Coste and Loup Marcault-Derouard slide magnificently, like two electrons floating in this unstable space.

Final creation by William Forsythe for the Paris Opera (2016), Blake Works I is a well-constructed and soberly staged choral choreography, for a large corps de ballet, to the rather whiny music of James Blake. Often danced since its entry into the repertoire, the piece is revived during this revival by a new generation of young dancers, such as Bleuenn Battistoni, named a star a few months ago, and the very young Inès McIntosh. In the first movement, whose feminine ports de bras recall Serenade of Balanchine, the soloists stand out rather than blend into the whole. But it is in the fourth movement, whose percussive rise often fell flat due to lack of virtuosity, that Inès McIntosh literally wows us, with a presence on stage eclipsing everything – including Battistoni.

Finally, the evening concludes with entry into the repertoire ofImpasse by Swedish choreographer Johan Inger, to happy music by Ibrahim Maalouf. A trio dances carefreely in front of the decor of a pointed house. A somewhat simple metaphor for our world which is capsizing, the scene becomes more and more populated to become unlivable: the trio is joined by other men, then by a horde of clownish characters (a pregnant woman with a pink lampshade on the head, a jester in a blue tutu, a shaggy man with a purple vintage suit…) who lead the trio into a twirling charivari. The piece ends with a projection on a screen of the house burning away, against the background of urgent music, while the bodies move uselessly. Pretty, without being either original or striking, this message piece could have had real depth if the strings had seemed less thick.

***11