Archives quotidiennes : 29 octobre 2026

By an additional accidental alignment of the stars, I had scored a ticket seven months ago to what turned out to be Dorothée Gilbert’s penultimate performance with the Paris Opera Ballet before her formal “adieux” would take place on October 15th. So here I was on the 12^th.

Don’t kill me, but it took me a while to warm up to Dorothée Gilbert ever since my eye had caught her in Les Deux Pigeons when she was still a student. Max Factor orange and baby pudding feet even back then couldn’t belie her steel will to get out there on stage.  It was like watching a young Joan Crawford claim her territory, just not in black and white.

In her early days with the company, Gilbert was so focused on crafting her own kind of perfection that when I saw a good number of her Fille mal gardées with Nicolas Le Riche (the number due to buying blind) she danced them exactly to the letter and so perfectly the same way each time it almost scared me. This young’un’s ferociously studious approach was not letting her evident charisma come to the fore. But oh, those balances!

Then Gilbert got paired with Hugo Marchand – in, yes, Manon — around ten years ago. They just clicked into place at first glance and ever since then Gilbert has relaxed and blossomed into the performer we are now so sad to let go. She no longer wastes even one split second concentrating on technical perfection. It’s there to the point that both she and the audience don’t worry about it at all. It’s a given. As with Joan Crawford, her performances have become both reliable and extravagant.

But what I mean by technical perfection is not “x-pirouettes” or “x-degree leg lifts.” What I mean is more about how the body is simply in the right place at the right time doing the right thing that will advance the plot. Gilbert’s body has always reminded me of a voice. Think back to those opera singers who sang with careful perfect placement and then, at one stage in their careers, “boom!” suddenly found the voice that gives you chills.

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So on October 12^th, Dorothée Gilbert and Hugo Marchand gave the audience all that we could have ever wanted (and have come to expect). But at this point is there anything left to say about their partnership that hasn’t been said? The “fit” of their very different physiques, their instinctive – synchronic and seamless — reactions to shifts in the moods in the music? Their utter lack of hesitation nor of a wisp of that carefulness that can dull a crescendo? If Marchand lofted Gilbert any higher in the lifts she’d just keep floating up and when he swoops her down it feels like an idea he’s just cooked up.  All this we know and what I saw was exactly what I expected. I think maybe some of us in the audience have been spoiled for too long…

Enter Manon. She has gazed around the square, locked eyes with Des Grieux, and then submitted trustingly to her brother’s care, even if she found that all these strangers patting and stroking her was getting to be a bit much.

Once this Manon and Des Grieux are left alone, well, the pas begins in playful sensuality (very cute, the way she makes him twirl). Their mutual admiration reads up until the top of the house. His solo is “I know this is it.” I have come to expect to delight in Marchand for his deliciously high opened-hip, balanced, yet “lean into your partner” arabesques à la Anthony Dowell.  I was not disappointed. He did tons of them, and each time they were indeed an expression of what his avatar was thinking

In the First Act, Thomas Doquir as Lescaut pulls his standing hip backwards when he does tours à la seconde. He manages to achieve them, but if he just stood up against the movement and pushed his standing hip a bit forward they’d look bigger. When he pops in again after the first Bedroom scene, Gilbert’s Manon by now knows that her dear brother is trouble. Yet she lets herself be manipulated and Doquir revisits his multiple turns as Rothbart. Gilbert’s Manon, eyes wide shut to her rich suitor’s foot fetish, says goodbye to the bed and a true love she really wanted. Oh, we all make mistakes along the way.

This stubborn inability to make the right choices for herself Is indeed visible to the audience. Her own analysis saying exactly this unfortunately popped up in an online interview, so now my judgement feels clouded. Or confirmed.

Bianca Scudamore’s flirty, feminine, joyous, sprightly, Mistress was the big surprise after a string of dutiful performances in other ballets recently. She danced big, with light and high élan. All this, while sharing the stage with an étoile who is practically a national monument at this point, takes balls.

I was now enormously curious to know what Scudamore would do when she took on the lead role soon after, but of course I couldn’t find a ticket.

In Act Two’s glittery black dress, Gilbert’s refusal to engage Marchand’s eye meant a lot. Scudamore, not trying to upstage anyone, had a “come on, let’s make all the guys pay attention” energy. Scudamore and Doquir’s Drunken Duet became quite funny this time around. She did a ZsaZsa while Doquir circled around her, dead serious, trying desperately not to admit to himself that he was beyond high.

Gilbert, during her solo and then when she gets passed around from man to man in the air, gave the audience the sight of how a thin veneer of ice can slowly begin to crack. What struck me was her blind confidence in all her partners as she was thrust round and about. Her trust in everyone and anyone as both dancer and character helped you understand why she was heedlessly running head-first into danger.

In the last act, Gilbert is not afraid of anything, not even the jailor. Her only enemy had been herself in the first place. There was such energy in her fatal exhaustion. She fought back against the jailor, against fate, against death. I was torn between thinking about how beautifully she kept struggling to get back on her toes and desperately trying not to think about this and just surrender to the moment. Even if this wasn’t her last performance, knowing it was my last time still distracted me. Half of me wanted to analyze every detail of this Gilbert/Marchand, half of me wanted to forget about “Gilbert/Marchand” and just live the experience.