The day after Benjamin Millepied announced his resignation, a new, rather overlong programme (three hours, including intervals) opened at Palais Garnier. The triple bill showcased Jérôme Bel’s “Tombe,” Millepied’s “The Night ends” (“La Nuit s’achève”), and Jerome Robbins’ “Goldberg Variations.”After Bel's 2004 documentary of corps de ballet dancer Véronique Doisneau, he returns to the house with a new metafiction. “Tombe” is comprised of three duets, each starring a different dancer from the Paris Opera Ballet (Grégory Gaillard, Sébastien Bertaud, and Benjamin Pech), who guide their female, non-dancer partners into a balletic fantasia: a supermarket cashier of color, an equestrian enthusiast whose riding accident resulted in an amputated leg, and an elderly balletomane who’s attended the shows of the POB for over fifty years. Each story follows a self-referencing narrative.The show begins with Gaillard denuding the stage and offering Henda Traore, along with the audience, a cursory glimpse of the gilded backstage - except that anyone can purchase a tour and see it for themselves; it simply reflected Bel’s recurrent preoccupation with stripping a show to its bare bones, leaving only the actors on stage mirroring their own selves. The adaptation of “Gisèle”, “danced” by wheelchair-bound Sandra Escudé, who impressively stood one-legged en pointe with sujet Sébastien Bertaud offering his arm for support, perhaps stands for one’s determination to dance despite physical disabilities – not a new idea, but a tired one.For the third duet étoiles Benjamin Pech, who bids farewell to the stage on February 20, chose Sylviane Milley as his dance partner - a balletomane who’s been a fan of his for decades. Illness, however, limited her attendance to a video projection of a recorded rehearsal between her and Pech, who sat as passive spectator on stage with his back to the audience, looking to the screen. A remark by Pech that she could not be replaced implies particular uniqueness, perhaps echoing Bel’s comment on individuality, a notion absent from the world of ballet, where second casts and replacement dancers are handily deployed as substitutes for roles not initially created for them.But what all three pas de deux managed to do was to diminish, to reduce these three women to a pitiable state whereby a paying audience, anticipating the technical majesty the Paris Opera Ballet is known for, snickered and guffawed throughout.Bel’s use of non-dancers attempts to make a case against discrimination in professional dance, encouraging amateurs to cohabit with professionals onstage. Provocative gestures aside, non-dance has itself become an institutionalized tradition and a style, which populates contemporary dance centers and museums the world over. Why waste the grandest stage of them all on what amounted to an act of exploitative charity and self-congratulatory moralizing?Mischievously taunting the standards of dance was always the case with Bel’s work but it is bordering on contempt for such a house to present such a show to its audience. Deconstructing traditional codes of the theatre has sometimes worked out but here he has created something boring and empty of the ideas redolent of the nouvelle danse française which emerged in the 1970s - a spectacle dependent on the shock of an unsuspecting audience, a cheap sucker punch.If we are to diminish ballet to such an extent, to disrespect a house of such history by programming amateur-hour drivel, then Millepied’s departure for the LA Dance Project is, indeed, a far more suitable post. Despite his departure, season 16/17, sees a programme he designed, populated with shows by non-dance choreographers including Dimitri Chamblas and Boris Charmatz on the main stage, and Tino Sehgal occupying the public spaces of Palais Garnier.That said, as a choreographer, Benjamin Millepied once again plumbed the depths of his mastery with “The Night ends,” his sixth work for the company. Set to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 Op. 57 in F minor, known also as “Appassionata,” and interpreted by Alain Planès, it is inspired by Jerome Robbins, and dedicated to the memory of the choreographer’s relative, Nicholas Petrides. This work seems to stand for a rite of passage. Lit by Madjid Hakimi, the stage carves a nocturnal shrine for Beethoven’s “Appassionata”: three arcades, three couples, and three movements of the sonata. Ensembles and pas de deux mix and match throughout the night, the dancers coming and going, leaping across thresholds like shooting stars, tracing elliptical shapes.For the first movement, “Allegro assai,” the three couples (étoile Amandine Albisson, étoile Hervé Moreau; sujet Sae Eun Park, sujet Marc Moreau; coryphée Jérémy-Loup Quer, coryphée Ida Viikinkoski) gleam in costumes of blue, red, and violet (designed by Allesandro Sartori). Forced by an outburst of different passions of courtly love, their bodies form beautiful constellations as they swirl and stream through the air. For the remaining two movements (“Andante con moto” and “Allegro ma non troppo – Presto”), the girls now wear their hair loose, a couple clads in white, and the other two in black bedtime-like attire. Their surging leaps grow larger, in sync with the sonata’s stormy coda. Their intense emotions escalate as the third movement climaxes to an extended final cadence in F minor, until the sonata reaches the end.Jerome Robbins’ 100-minute long piece, “Goldberg Variations” (1971), set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s piece of music of the same name (1742), is his sixteenth work entering the repertoire. All thirty-nine dancers, of varying rank, demonstrating the high perfectionism for which they are known, rigorously interpreted this neoclassical ballet.Eliciting a range of emotional states, dancers outfitted in 18th century costume and modern leotards, school us in the language of dance - from baroque to neoclassical ballet, to folk dance, stepping into jazz. The American pianist, Simone Dinnerstein, dutifully played the thirty-plus variations leading the dancers’ exquisite, academic steps.Praiseworthy was a poetic interpretation by étoile Myriam Ould-Braham; her refined lines and flawless dance was only enhanced by the challenge set out by the equally excellent étoile Mathias Heymann. But nothing compared to the meticulous largesse of étoile Marie-Agnès Gillot in her pas de deux with the muscular, premier danseur Hugo Marchand, their long limbs extending the piano notes.Classical though it may be, “Goldberg Variations” acted as pointed rebuke to Bel’s failed proposition and Milliepied’s misjudgment of the company. Here the dancers lived in their skin, breathed their natural order, and proved that you can take the ballet out of dance, but you most surely cannot take the dancer out of the ballet.Until February 20, 2016 at Palais Garnier, Paris Opera Ballet, France. To mark Benjamin Pech’s official farewell to the stage, the Bel/Robbins evening will be accompanied by Jerome Robbins' ballet “In The Night” and an extract of Angelin Preljocaj's ballet “Le Parc” on February 20, 2016.
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