Roland Petit: A French Choreographer, Most Savored in France

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/arts/dance/roland-petit-paris-opera-ballet.html

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PARIS — The huge Opéra Bastille was strangely quiet, the clatter of the musicians settling in to the orchestra pit echoing in the nearly empty theater. It was April 1, two days after the scheduled opening night of Roland Petit’s “Notre-Dame de Paris,” the first of two Paris Opera Ballet programs commemorating the 10th anniversary of Petit’s death. But a new lockdown in France obliged the company to cancel all its shows. The performance that I saw was being filmed, watched by a handful of journalists and Paris Opera employees. (It will be broadcast later in the summer.)

I was curious about “Notre-Dame,” a work that Petit (1924-2011) created for the Paris Opera in 1965. The company performs it intermittently, but I had never seen it. Like most ballet-lovers living outside of France, I knew little of Petit’s large oeuvre apart from the two works that made him famous: “Carmen” (1949) and “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort” (1946), which got a particular boost when Mikhail Baryshnikov performed it in the opening scene of the 1985 movie, “White Nights.”

Those two pieces, along with “Les Rendez-Vous” (1945), make up the second Paris Opera program, which will open (pandemic permitting) on May 30, giving Parisian audiences a sampler of Petit’s greatest hits.

That France’s most important ballet company is performing the work of a major French choreographer shouldn’t seem particularly unusual. But even in Petit’s home country, his works haven’t been staged with great regularity. Nor do companies seem especially interested in resuscitating any of the dozens of full-length works or shorter ballets he created over the course of a long career.

It’s a curious schism: Despite the relative obscurity of much of Petit’s work, he remains much-revered in France, where he is still described as a great choreographer who is pivotal to a French ballet heritage. He is regarded as an important creator of story ballets, like the British Kenneth MacMillan — both fervent believers in narrative ballet (an unfashionable stance in the 1960s) that could incorporate modern ideas about sexuality and depravity.

“He was a visionary choreographer who created roles that could change you artistically, aesthetically, technically, as a dancer,” said Aurélie Dupont, the director of the Paris Opera Ballet. “It’s our responsibility to keep his works alive.”

“Notre-Dame” has much in common with his famous shorter pieces. Its opening scene suggests a conventional story ballet set in the medieval era of the Victor Hugo novel that it’s based on. Couples cross the darkened stage at a stately pace, their faces obscured by huge headdresses, their cream cloaks sweeping behind them in the sepulchral gloom.

But then the lights come up strongly, revealing lines of dancers in short, bright, decidedly not-period costumes by Yves Saint Laurent, their eyes ghoulishly darkened. They hold their arms out at right angles, fingers splayed, moving forward with ungainly frog-legged stomps. This isn’t Victor Hugo’s Paris anymore, but a stylized world that mingles 1960s chic, music hall and grand spectacle.

It’s all highly enjoyable once you let go of any desire for narrative or period accuracy. Much like the well known shorter works, the setting of the ballet is abstracted; the décor, by René Allio, suggests the stained-glass frontage of its namesake cathedral; at a later point huge bells (from which Quasimodo swings) tell us we are inside. There is no attempt at realism. And as in “Carmen,” the characters of “Notre-Dame” aren’t burdened with profound psychological depths, or historical veracity.

Petit is a clear, effective dance storyteller partly because he doesn’t muddy the waters with complex characterization or relationships; instead, he distills narrative to its essentials, often blending realism and fantasy. Theatricality and visual impact are the objectives; the corps is deployed almost entirely for visual effect in “Notre-Dame.” Petit never bothered with corps de ballet work “more than as a salad around a lobster,” as the ballerina Violette Verdy, a member of Petit’s early companies, said in Meredith Daneman’s biography of Margot Fonteyn.

Outside France, little of Petit’s oeuvre is performed, and that little tends to be in Russia, perhaps because the large-scale theatrics and visual power of Petit’s work are reminiscent of Soviet-era pieces like “Spartacus.”

“I honestly don’t know why his ballets aren’t danced much elsewhere,” said Tamara Rojo the artistic director of English National Ballet, one of the few companies in Britain or the United States to have performed Petit’s work in the last decade. “Perhaps one reason is that he wasn’t ashamed of being popular, and there is a certain snobbishness about that. And then in the U.S., there is a reverence about Balanchine; in Britain the same about Ashton, and a sort of protectionism comes in.”

Petit effectively pushed postwar French ballet into a new era, leaving behind the princes and swan queens of the 19th century to create 20th-century characters who seemed radically modern and fresh.

His impact on the French ballet scene began early, when at 21 he left the Paris Opera Ballet to create a series of ballets organized by the critic Irène Lidova and Boris Kochno, formerly secretary to the great ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev.

A Diaghilevian spirit of collaboration and a distinctive theatrical flair marked Petit from the outset. While still in his 20s, he created most of the pieces that are still danced today. Among the artists, writers and composers who collaborated with him were Jacques Prévert, Jean Cocteau, Jean Anouilh, Picasso, Leonor Fini and Joseph Kosma, many of whom he met because they frequented his father’s bistro, in the Les Halles area of Paris.

It was “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort” (1946) that put Petit on the international scene. The story, devised by Cocteau, concerns a young artist tormented by his beloved, a cruel muse who turns out to be death itself. The ballet, set to Bach’s C-minor Passacaglia, hit a nerve in postwar France and beyond. The role of the young man turned Jean Babilée into a star, and it has been irresistible to male dancers, including Rudolf Nureyev and Baryshnikov, ever since.

Erotic torment of a different sort was also the subject of “Carmen,” created for Petit’s future wife Zizi (then known as Renée) Jeanmaire, sporting cropped hair and a short, corset-like tunic that showed off her spectacular legs. With Jeanmaire as an embodiment of sexual temptation and narcissistic willfulness, and Petit as the suffering, stoic Don José, the piece caused a sensation at its 1949 premiere in London. When the company toured to New York later that year, the admiring New York Herald Tribune review by Walter Terry was headlined “Sex and More Sex.”

But by the 1960s, Petit’s theatrical flamboyance and onstage sexual provocativeness were less well received. When he created a version of “Pelléas and Melisande” for Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev in 1969, the reviews weren’t kind. “Loyalty is a great virtue, but the Royal Ballet’s loyalty to the French choreographer Roland Petit rather resembles the loyalty of the Ancient Mariner to his albatross,” Clive Barnes wrote in a New York Times review, going on to criticize the “the fantastic banality of the choreography which appears to envision triteness as a new lifestyle.”

Fonteyn’s belief in Petit’s talent might well have come from her experience of creating a role in his 1948 “Les Desmoiselles de la Nuit,” which she performed with his company in Paris. In that role, Verdy said, Fonteyn showed a hitherto unsuspected sensuousness, a quality that Petit knew how to evoke in his ballerinas.

“He was very ahead of his time in creating really strong female characters,” Rojo said. “The unashamed sexuality on the stage was shocking at the time.”

After a sojourn in Hollywood, where he choreographed a number of films in the early 1950s (including “Hans Christian Andersen,” “The Glass Slipper” and “Daddy Long Legs”), Petit returned to France. He bought the Casino de Paris, staging reviews for his wife, had a short-lived stint in 1970 as director of the Paris Opera Ballet, then became the founding director of the Marseilles Ballet in 1972, where he remained until a contentious parting in 1998.

During those years, he created a prodigious number of ballets (his total output is around 170 pieces), often based on literary sources. But after he withdrew the rights to his dances from the Marseilles company, most disappeared from the stage.

“If work isn’t seen, other artistic directors don’t have the chance to think, ‘I’d like that piece for my company,’” said Ariane Dollfus, a French journalist who is writing a biography of Jeanmaire. “It’s a pity because many are very good.”

But even during his Marseille tenure, his ballets didn’t percolate into repertories worldwide, as did MacMillan’s narrative pieces like “Manon” or “Romeo and Juliet.” This could be a question of cultural tastes; the theatricality, frank spectacle and striking design that has historically appealed to French audiences is less appealing to British and American traditions, differently honed by the pure-dance formalism and pared-down narratives of Frederick Ashton, Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.

And unlike the United States or Britain, where national choreographic heritages have been entrenched by major companies, France has been far less consistent about promoting its own ballet history. The staging of works by Petit, Serge Lifar, Pierre Lacotte or the mostly forgotten Janine Charrat is patchy and dependent on who is running the major companies.

The current generation of French ballet directors still have direct links to Petit and his works; will he remain important to a new guard?

“These are historic pieces, like a Monet in a museum, a representation of the time that they were created,” Dupont said. “His relationship to beauty, to eroticism, to death, are still strong themes that keep speaking to us.”

Asked whether she had any plans to revive Petit pieces that are no longer performed, Dupont hesitated. “Not at the moment,” she said, “but, why not?”