La petite danseuse de Degas
Choreography: Patrice Bart
Paris Opera Ballet
Palais Garnier
29 June 2010
“The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” is one of the Musée d’Orsay’s best-known pieces. Perhaps even more than his numerous paintings of dancers, Degas’ small bronze statue with its inscrutable expression captures the ambivalence of a young ballerina’s dreams in the 19th century. The discovery of the model’s identity in the 1990s prompted the idea of a ballet based on her life: a romantic young girl studying at the Paris Opera Ballet School is pushed by her mother to seduce the “regulars” in a ballet world where sex is the route to preferment. And who better than the Paris Opera Ballet itself to dance the story of her demise?
The idea may have been excellent, but the resulting production, premiered in 2003, is almost fatally flawed. The score that Denis Levaillant was commissioned to compose is not dance-friendly – obscure and at times dissonant, it fails to evoke the lively atmosphere of 19th-century Paris, not helped either by the set’s drab backcloths. The costumes, from the reproduction of the Little Dancer’s tutu to an eccentric take on bustle gowns in the second act, are charmingly sophisticated, a trademark of the Paris Opera, but the world Patrice Bart translates to the stage emerges with little resonance, historical or otherwise. (…)
» Read the full review in the Financial Times
