Archives de Tag: Spring Season

Sleeping Beauty/La Belle au Bois Dormant. Paris, Opera Bastille.

March 11, 13, 22 and April 3^rd, 2025.

Stagecraft

Sleeping Beauty made me fall in love with ballet but at the same time, each time I see it, I begin wonder just why at some point (I still cannot pinpoint when), this ballet starts taking too long. Something could be cut. But what, where, when? And why?

I’m still stuck pondering this question decades later, even as this ballet makes me feel like a bee just gob-smacked by all the pollen out there on stage, bemusedly happy to just sit and watch a swarm of dancers bumble around in all the colors of its endlessness.

March 13^th and April 3^rd. During first intermission, I met up with some young American dancers. To my dismay, they assumed that Bluenn Battistoni had just graduated from the Paris Opera Ballet school and was being given her first big chance. I tried to argue that the French style, like the French people, is modest and reserved, more about perfection rather than chutzpah. (The company has been eternally misunderstood by those many American critics who value flash). But I didn’t even manage to convince myself. Battistoni’s dancing is absolutely stunning and technically polished, but her stage presence was way too reserved – over-calm — this performance. I’m not saying she needs to sell out, just learn to catch the limelight a little more. She’s completely assured but not assertive enough. With the right coach I am sure Battistoni will move from inward-looking glow into eye-catchingly demure radiance.

Battistoni, on the second night, channeled a newly skippy feel to her hops and gargouillades. She was asserting herself more, aha, but remained soft-spoken.

Bleuenn Batistoni (Aurore) et Guillaume Diop (Désiré)

Inès McIntosh on March 11^th was more extraverted but she, like Battistoni, would probably be better served right now by Balanchine’s clever abstraction of Sleeping Beauty’s formal magic: Theme and Variations. That is not to say that McIntosh didn’t offer a powerful mini-mad scene after her finger was pricked. McIntosh has undeniable presence, but she hasn’t yet grown into projecting that kind of distillation of womanliness offered by so many of the Auroras I’ve seen from Fonteyn on down.  In the Vision Scene, she just didn’t know how to project vulnerability and yearning.   At the end of the evening I left the theatre humming Don Q instead of SB.

Ines McIntosh. Aurore

March 22^nd. Powerful yet demure radiance is exactly what Héloïse Bourdon embodies these days. She just glows. In her one shot this season as Princess Aurora, I was delighted by how she reminded me in her solos of where the choreography and music echo bits and pieces of her Fairy godmothers’ variations. The Prologue had come together to shape the personality of this princess. Bourdon’s hard-earned stagecraft (don’t get me started again on all the reasons she should have promoted ages ago) offers a gift to the audience. You don’t have to be a balletomane to feel that something big is happening, but if you are a balletomane you relish her mastery of both steps and nuance all the more. I was bewitched.

Bourdon Docquir March 22

On other nights I was reduced to sitting back and basking in the authority and easy confidence of the same Bourdon’s repeated brief stints as Sixth Fairy during the Prologue. This variation is normally given to THE Lilac Fairy, but alas Nureyev morphed Lilac into a separate and, when not mimed with authority, utterly insipid panto role. Why turn the juiciest solo into a random outing with no follow-through? Instead of a powerful ballerina/catalyst, THE fairy turns out to be a random junior dancer in a cut-out costume dominated by a big wig à la Lina Lamont from Singing in the Rain insipidly miming – with one cast exeption – “Oh Carabosse, you shouldn’t have come. No, no, no.”

Bourdon’s suitors in Act One clearly appreciated this well-bred Aurora in bloom.  “A rose? How kind of you.” She wasn’t “selling it” in a flashy way, nevertheless the people sitting near me literally screamed at the end of the adagio and a young man right behind me gasped in shock when she pricked her finger. Yeah, sure, vox populi. But I was equally enthralled by such gracefully and authoritatively danced intelligence. During the Vision scene, Bourdon’s control and release and way of finishing each phrase now evoked memories of the way she had danced at her birthday party. Each act had you plunge deeper and deeper into all the facets and colors that are buried in a diamond.

Of course, Bourdon has one great advantage over the other two Auroras I saw: on-stage experience in the ballet. The last time this ballet was given in Paris was over a decade ago, so neither Battistoni nor McIntosh have had the luxury to start out as a little fairy, get the music and production into their bones and muscle memory, watch and learn from the stars while in the wings or milling about dressed for a mazurka. Stagecraft takes years.

Part of my reticence about the Beauties could be blamed on the hard-working and well-meaning Prince Desirés of both Thomas Docquir and Guillaume Diop. As most of the company’s male principals had decided to hang out over at the Palais Garnier and devote themselves to performing in Mats Ek’s Appartment rather than be involved in this run, basically there were few men left.

Both, as if they were relief pitchers, were scheduled to partner at least two if not three ballerinas. Where is the rehearsal time then to craft intimacy in dance and drama with your partner? Where is the time to work on your own role?

As I noted to myself during Act Two: “McIntosh seems better on her own and fills the space when she is the dream.” Act Three: “Fish dives with Docquir not thrilling. Steps executed, zero connection, she seems like a doll instead of a woman. Isn’t this supposed to be a wedding?”

Perhaps Thomas Docquir (March 11^th and March 22^nd) has simmered too long in secondary roles, including endless iterations of Rothbart, to be “the one.”  He has clearly been working on refining his technique (solid from the start but now more polished, elastic, finessed, held up high) and elongating his lines. But, seriously, it is now time for Docquir to build up his self-confidence and stop avoiding the spotlight. When he came out on the stage in Act Two…both times few in the audience caught on that he was supposed to be the star.  His Vision scene solo was made for some nice lines, yet the longing was missing. He didn’t ever challenge McIntosh to do that one percent more and when I next saw him with Bourdon my always accentuate-the-positive seatmate made an interesting comment. “If even he can’t believe that he is a prince, then why should she believe him? [pause] Then why should I?”

Guillaume Diop (Désiré)

Guillaume Diop (March 13^th and April 3^rd) is so talented and cheerfully radiant – and known — that even if he’s sometimes just a bit too all over the place (not only Etoile but  in-demand fashion icon), the audience just takes to him before he even takes a second step. I saw him twice with Battistoni and clearly he learns fast and carries over new ideas from performance to performance. By the second performance I saw, the partnering between their had developed. Intense eye-contact led to easier connection.

He’s a very attentive partner – boy does he just know how to hold out his hand and whip his girl into pirouettes with concentrated nonchalance — and as a soloist he has impressive elevation and strength (those barrel turns). But he has got to keep working on refining his feet, still just a bit forgotten as they are too far away from his head, and he especially needed to re-ground his plié (I winced a few times on the 13th). While he knows how to stretch out of his balances, he’s begun to sit back on his standing leg and is not pulling up enough through his hip…a sign of being tired. He’s dancing too much and this worries me. Nevertheless, I am curious to how partnering a much more seasoned stage partner during the next run – Amandine Albisson — might galvanize him. Two young-uns is cute. Young talent rubbing up against stagecraft often results in more.

To be Continued…