December 2024 | Les Balletonautes

At the Opera Bastille, December 17 and 18, 2024

What would it have looked like in the end if Giselle’s heart had not been broken, Albrecht had forgotten about Bathilde in two seconds flat, and they lived happily ever after? Their names would be Valentine Colasante and Guillaume Diop. Their courtship would be bathed in sunshine from beginning to end.

What would it look have looked like if Swanhilda had been kidnapped by campy gypsies? She would have gotten her desired Franz in the end by hook or by crook, and the two of them would be called Léonore Baulac and Marc Moreau. A rainbow would smile upon them.

Paquita. December 17th (Valentine Colasante, Guillaume Diop, Pablo Legasa). Curtain call.

On December 17th, the light and unpretentious manner of Colasante’s Paquita made the audience root for her from start to finish. But to me, she seemed a bit…tame (for lack of a better word). This girl would either be saved by a prince charming, or not. Diop’s youthfully eager hero made his “blink and I’m done” attraction to her quite clear. And Colasante’s Paquita seemed to fluff up every time she was around him. He’s a very nice guy and a caring partner, an Albrecht with no secret story.

Diop kind of overdid it in his first solo, trying to impress his partner, as if he had been coached by Nicolas Le Riche for better or for worse. What I mean is that Le Riche had glorious talent and a penchant for rousing the audience with his split leaps even if that meant sacrificing precision. You might have seen a few off-finishes, a right leg that turned in too early before marvelous leaps and, much less visibly, “my toes aren’t completely stretched right now.” But the audience clearly did not care for such picky details. He got it all back into control as the evening went on. This very young étoile will hopefully use Manuel Legris as his model instead from now on: he’s got the talent to be the kind of star who never sacrifices precision for expression nor the other way around and still delights an audience.

For me, I wonder whether Valentine Colasante could make more of a contrast between 1) the 1840’s-ish first act of mime and terre à terre caressing of the floor by the foot (the realm of Carlotta Grisi, the first Paquita as well as the first Giselle) and 2) the full-out Petipa of the second act. She could have used really broken-in and more tapered toe shoes at first before later switching to those shiny modern ones when really needed. I wonder if her coach didn’t somehow convince this lovely ballerina, who makes dancing seem as natural as breathing, to dance “small and controlled.”

At some point I could not stop thinking about how everything had been so correct and well-rehearsed and pretty for hours now that maybe a bit of acceleration and deceleration of the phrasings would be welcome. All the partnering had been perfectly worked out and Diop did a great job on making the lifts work. But why was I actually thinking about the technique of partnering as I was watching, rather than swept away?

By the last act I was “OK, whatever, I’m not having a bad time. Maybe clean and pearly is just fine. Maybe rehearse it hard and just do it is all you need?” Their lines really matched, elegantly classical and not flashy. The audience around me was barely breathing, completely entranced by some kind of fairy magic. For me the last travelled lines in the last big pas could have travelled more, but did anyone around care other than me? No.

A night later the “feel” was very different, but why feel you need to choose between apples and oranges or sunshine and a rainbow?

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Whereas Valentine Colasante had shaped a Paquita gently doubtful but confused and insecure about her origins, Baulac’s Paquita was “nope, I know this is not right. I’m better than all of this. Hm. Maybe I can start getting attention by just swishing my skirt.” Her Swanhilda, cheerily resourceful from the get-go, helped give the limp narrative a bit more of a dramatic arc than it normally has. In Scene Two at the tavern, Baulac was definitely trying to save her Franz from losing his life to bad wine, and was way more focused on making the most out of the opportunities for slapstick. No damsel in distress, this one.

Instead of a ready, willing, and able youth, Marc Moreau, as soon as he appeared onstage, defined space around himself as a perfectly poised Lucien d’Hervilly , a gentleman in no way boyish but definitely open to adventure. His technique was precise, but he didn’t forget about the big picture either.

In Léonore Baulac’s radiant Paquita, there was no way that Marc Moreau was going to find a Giselle. Perhaps a little adventure might happen in the woods with a naughty sylph, very flirty and strong-willed from the start? Nope, not that either. This man had no chance of getting away, and he didn’t mind at all. Moreau and Baulac’s lifts felt more naturally floated and less “rehearsed” than the night past. Everything felt more reactive than activated. At one point, he slid his hand gently down her arm from her shoulder to her wrist before a turn. Yesterday that same moment had been “I’ve got the wrist, let’s go.” During the last act, I began to fantasize about seeing Baulac and Moreau dance an iridescent and inflected Theme and Variations.

Paquita, December 18th (Léonore Baulac, Marc Moreau, Pablo Legasa). Curtain call.

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What’s so weird about Pierre Lacotte’s reinvention of Paquita is that despite its numerous dramaturgical faults, it works for the audience. And this big ball of fluff actually works much better now that it is housed at the Opera Bastille. As opposed to the tight box that is the Palais Garnier’s stage, here all the endless group dances (from the waltzes to the children’s polonaise) do in fact get space to breathe and be danced big…albeit not always with the music and often messily aligned.

However, a breath of air does not excuse the other weaknesses that this yet another Pierre Lacotte staging of yet another 19th century ballet always had in the first place. The plot summary provided in the fat program (save your money and just invent your own plot) will never rhyme or reason with what you see on stage. And, frankly, certain aspects of the plot have gotten even fuzzier due to a bigger venue with more distant sightlines.

Who on earth can tell that the evil governor’s much more youthful daughter (as we see it) in fact happens to be his sister (not to mention that we are often unsure whether he wants Lucien killed or Paquita). I’d always thought Bathilde in Giselle was kind of a loser role, but Dona Serafina? She appears, dances a little, sits down stage left and then just fades from view until curtain. Both Nais Dubosq (a bit of a wallflower on the 17th ) and Fanny Gorse (more assertive on the 18th if that is humanly possible) tried to give this impoverished role a bit of visibility.

And then this: from nowhere in the house now – OK, maybe from the front row — can you now even begin to decipher what is written on that “marble slab” in Act One ? But the worst part is that, due to sitting even further away than normal at the Opera Bastille, “the locket,” [our heroine’s “get out of jail free” card] becomes even more spectacularly illegible, too. Why couldn’t repeated locket pantomime have been a priority in Lacotte’s eye? Maybe give the little thing a Giselle/Bathilde kind of big awkward necklace visibility? Instead, the “key to the mystery” is pinned to the dancer’s skirt in a way that cannot be seen. Perhaps the hip level location is historically correct. But I bet the pendant was bigger, maybe against a darker skirt, and its original theft accompanied by mime of a more semaphoric variety. It’s now been just about two decades that I’ve watched Lacotte’s reconstruction of this “lost ballet.” Only once did I actually notice Inigo steal the locket in the first place. This needs to be seen, maybe à la Basilio stealing the innkeeper’s money bag. The dancer’s fault? No. Lacotte should have made a lot of the panto way bigger.

On both nights, Pablo Legasa was wasted as the manipulative Inigo. Like Audric Bezard once was, he’s getting stuck in character roles when he’s really a danseur noble. Legasa’s acting responds to his ballerina, he’s just not a ham. So it was logical that he was no macho gypsy king on either night. With the gentle Colasante, he was Berthe, worried about a daughter who dances too much. When facing off with a tricksy Baulac, Legasa morphed into a hapless Doctor Coppelius, naturally.

Speaking of Coppelia. Why doesn’t the company perform one of the greatest ballets ever created for it? Why are reconstructed first acts buried in a vault at the school, only to be exhumed for the Paris public maybe once about every fifteen years? And why, instead of letting Lacotte dig himself a deep hole with his swan song – the dreadful Le Rouge et le Noir – hadn’t management simply asked him to come in and toss off an act three?