The Paris Opera Ballet is honoring composer and conductor Pierre Boulez with an intense triple bill featuring Wayne McGregor’s new work, “Alea Sands,” Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia,” and Pina Bausch’s “Le Sacre du printemps.”Originally created for the New York City Ballet in 2001, Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia” is the first work of his to enter the repertory of the Paris Opera Ballet. Set to György Ligeti’s ten disordered, multi-layered pieces for piano (1947-1985), “Polyphonia” is romantic with a contemporary twist and a humorous touch. A dynamic opening ensemble utilizing a full cast of eight dancers carves crystal clear, geometric shapes, casting their shadows onto a white backdrop. A series of duets and solos follow, with each embodying attitudes driven by a variety of emotional states, culminating in an ensemble finale.After “Genus” (2007) and “The Anatomy of Sensation (for Francis Bacon)” (2011), “Alea Sands” is the third creation by Wayne McGregor for the Paris Opera Ballet. This contemporary piece pays homage to Pierre Boulez’s experimentation with “controled chance” in the 1950s, which he developed in the article Aléa (1957) - a conceptual framework of aleatoric music, a term first coined by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955. Derived from the Latin word aleatoire, meaning random, or the rolling of dice - after the Greek soldier Alea who invented the board game tabula - it also echoes the former name of McGregor’s company, Random Dance.Boulez’s Anthèmes II (1991/1997), the composition this ballet is set to, consists of solo violin performed by Michael Barenboim, which, as a hyper-instrument, is augmented in space by real-time computerized electronic music designed by Ircam (Andrew Gerzso and Gilbert Nouno), acting both as frequency shifter and harmonizer. “Alea Sands” opens with a prelude of electric, environmental experience to scatter dancers onstage.Waiting for the curtain to rise and the dance to begin, the audience lift their heads as lights positioned in eight sections at the periphery of the ceiling dome start flickering to a choreography that follows a set of random, controlled, flashes and blackouts mixed with corresponding buzzing sounds. These are sourced from the electrical mains and designed by sculptural installation artist, Haroon Mirza. Mirza, who won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, is another daring collaboration of McGregor’s after his most recent one with Olafur Eliasson for the phantasmagorical “Tree of Codes.” “This is drawn from an earlier work of mine, ‘Adam, Eve, other and a UFO’,” Mirza explained. Like a halo, crowning everyone seated beneath, the dance of dazzling light brought the nearly 2,600-square-foot canvas - designed in 1964 by modernist painter Marc Chagall - as well as the glorious, magisterial architecture, center stage.The elevated and hyperextended étoile, Marie-Agnès Gillot, is finally unveiled and cuts loose in a captivating, high-powered solo. She is dressed in a bodysuit featuring geometrical shapes, designed by Gareth Pugh, who explains: “the costumes here follow the idea of removal, as opposed to ‘Carbon Life,’ where I played with the concept of addition.”More dancers take to the stage in similar costume patterned in varying geometric shapes, following a series of solos and duets where they wind and twist their bodies to then form, and deform, meandering ensembles. In a magical solo, étoile Jérémie Belingard’s athletic frame seemed to glide across some invisible sandscape, fighting with currents, evading hazards, whilst the lights over the audience were mimicking the music spatially. Recently promoted to première dancer, Léonore Baulac’s first appearance in a McGregor work proved naturally suitable: sensually undulating her petit corpus, her charm was serpentine.In their purest form and agender (even their eyebrows have been erased), the machine-like dancers are being danced by the music rather than dancing to it. As if electrical currents run through their veins, an automatic reaction to the music seems to pull different points of their bodies unexpectedly. One recalls Salvador Dali’s “The Burning Giraffe” (1937), only as metaphor, for each dancer’s individual corporal vocabulary; secret drawers are opened by Boulez’s composition, manipulated by Ircam. McGregor used the rubrics of stochastic game during the creation process of this work to fix a choreography in which there are moments allowing the dancers to improvise – every performance is, hence, different. “I think [the body] is the most technologically literate thing that we have,” he says.The dialogue between music, dance, and lighting was paralleled by the projection of a slowly emerging shape of a gear; Mirza explained to Blouin Artinfo, how the abstract, graphic representation of the sound is formed on the backdrop: “A microphone is attached to the violin, the computer program receives all the data that the violin is generating to then process and translate them into the circular and then the vertical motive – to project to the binary thing as singularity. That projection is never the same.” Commanding the entire space and enveloping the viewer, McGregor directs a total art experience, which deftly melds the three constellations of dance, music, and visual arts. Opening up the stage onto the main opera hall, the spatial extension of the spectacle, further materializes Boulez’s attempt to create a sound alchemy that activates all of the senses.Closing the evening is Pina Bausch’s masterpiece; the poetic, pagan rite, “Le Sacre du printemps” (1975) set to Igor Stravinsky’s score (1935), which entered the Paris Opera Ballet’s repertory in 1997.Rolf Borzik’s scenography transforms the stage, covered with soil, into an archaic and earthy representation of both life and death but also achieves a certain movement of the dancers, reflecting the gravitas of the intense ritual they are engaged in and leaving behind them traces of the violent sacrifice of a young girl for the god of Spring. Surrounded by a corps in an exhaustive, relentless sequence as much possessed as she is, the young girl was cast with great emotional vigor and superlative interpretation by étoile Eleonora Abbagnato who, dancing herself to death, took everyone’s breath away in addition to her own.
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