When English National Ballet asked me to write programme notes for their upcoming Roland Petit mixed bill (July 21-24), I didn’t realise the celebration would turn into a posthumous homage. The news of Petit’s death shocked the ballet world last week, and while it casts a shadow over this London run, there is perhaps no better way to remember him than to go to the Coliseum and explore three of his greatest works: Carmen, L’Arlésienne and Le Jeune homme et la Mort. Here is a short excerpt of my piece on his choreographic style to encourage you to attend:

Cover of the Roland Petit programme © English National Ballet

Many have tried to emulate Diaghilev’s achievements with the Ballets Russes, but few come as close as French choreographer Roland Petit in terms of creativity. A product of the Paris Opera Ballet School, he set up on his own at barely 20 and took full advantage of the resources of postwar Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, bringing together some of the finest painters, poets and designers for his first creations. Armed with a lucid, intensely dramatic neoclassical style, he embraced narrative choreography with distinctive chic.

Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (The Young Man and Death) is Petit at his most concise, distilling the essence of existential despair. A restless young man in a Paris garret is visited by a woman, a femme fatale who taunts him into committing suicide. Their perverse game ruffled more than a few feathers in 1946, but Le Jeune Homme’s enduring appeal as a total work of art owes much to the collaborative effort behind it – Roland Petit knocked on Jean Cocteau’s door for a libretto, and the French poet shaped the “mimodrama” with his own blend of realism and fantasy. Designer Georges Wakhévitch provided innovative cinema sets for the premiere, and as the woman leads the hero away as Death after his suicide, the seedy room gives way to an arresting vision of the Parisian rooftops. (…)

→ Roland Petit programme, English National Ballet, July 2011.

You can read the rest in the programme English National Ballet will be handing out at every performance this weekend – please go and celebrate Roland Petit with them.

» English National Ballet’s website (book tickets here)
» Roland Petit’s official website
» Video: Roland Petit season in rehearsal (English National Ballet)

Jérémie Bélingard (Paris Opera Ballet) in Le Jeune homme et la Mort © Anne Deniau