Idol Dreams

Conceived by a Frenchman in imperial Russia and restaged by a Russian in post-Cold War France, “La Bayadère” periodically returns to the Paris Opera stage with its fakirs, idols and opium dreams. While companies elsewhere have increasingly felt compelled to reckon with the ballet’s blatant orientalism, Rudolf Nureyev’s 1992 Paris production has remained almost defiantly intact. More than thirty years later, however, the living proximity to Nureyev’s hand, to his theatrical logic, dramatic instinct and obsessive sense of detail, has inevitably faded. What risks remaining is a threefold nostalgia: nostalgia for a ballet already shaped by Nureyev’s nostalgia for the Kirov, and, before that, by Marius Petipa’s nostalgic dream of an imagined India.

Performance

Paris Opera Ballet: “La Bayadère” by Rudolf Nureyev

Place

Bastille, Paris, France, June 18, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Paul Marque and Sae Eun Park in “La Bayadère” by Rudolph Nureyev. Photograph by Yonathan Kellerman | OnP

Before Marius Petipa and Sergei Khudekov created “La Bayadère” in St Petersburg in 1877, the figure of the bayadère had already circulated for decades through travel writing, Romantic poetry and theatrical exoticism. The word derives from the Portuguese bailadeira, the name given by Portuguese colonists to the Indian devadāsīs, female temple dancers. In ballet, one of the more immediate precedents was “Le Dieu et la Bayadère,” created at the Paris Opera in 1830 to Auber’s music, with choreography by Filippo Taglioni for his daughter, the legendary Marie Taglioni. Another came through Petipa’s own family: “Sacountalâ,” choreographed by his brother Lucien at the Paris Opera in 1858, with music by Ernest Reyer and a libretto by Théophile Gautier, the librettist of “Giselle,” loosely based on Kālidāsa’s Sanskrit drama Abhijñānaśākuntalam.

Nureyev’s version preserves this nineteenth-century fantasy through further layers: the Russian tradition that had transformed the ballet across more than a century, and his own biography. As a young Kirov artist, he had introduced Paris to “The Kingdom of the Shades” at the Palais Garnier in 1961; at the end of his life and career, he returned to the work as choreographer of the full three-act ballet. That history remains visible throughout the production, where passages of pantomime become danced scenes, especially in Act I, and Solor is granted greater dramatic weight. What results is a monument of imperial Russian ballet and a final homage to the maison, the Paris Opera, whose identity Nureyev had helped to reshape. The production’s grandeur is further enhanced by unforgettable visual choices: Ezio Frigerio’s inhabited sets, with their Indian and Ottoman echoes, and Franca Squarciapino’s richly coloured costumes, drawn from Indo-Persian iconography.

The plot is driven by love, rank and rivalry, the familiar machinery of nineteenth-century ballet, but with a crucial twist: at its centre lies not only the impossible love between a man and a woman, but also the collision of two strong women placed on opposite sides of power, the sacred and the regal. One might recall that Verdi’s “Aida,” premiered in Cairo in 1871, reached the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St Petersburg in 1875, the very stage on which “La Bayadère” would be born two years later. The exotic setting and the female rivalry between Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian princess, and Amneris, daughter of Pharaoh, over Radamès, the warrior they both love, might have been in the air. In “La Bayadère,” Nikiya, the temple dancer, loves Solor, the noble warrior who has sworn fidelity to her; the Rajah Dugmanta, however, intends him to marry his daughter Gamzatti. When Gamzatti discovers the lovers’ bond, she first tries to buy Nikiya’s renunciation, then to force it. When both attempts fail, Nikiya’s death becomes the condition of Gamzatti’s triumph.

Thomas Docquir in “La Bayadère” by Rudolph Nureyev. Photograph by Yonathan Kellerman | OnP

In this revival, Paul Marque’s Solor becomes even less the brutal centre of the drama, shifting the focus towards the opposition between Nikiya and Gamzatti. Marque is technically astonishing, with crystalline turns, outstanding elevation and partnering of unfailing precision and dedication. Dramatically, he brings a beautiful weakness to the role and indeed constructs a Solor of his own: gentle, hesitant, almost caught between two fires. Sae Eun Park is a formidable ballerina, and her Nikiya is at once delicate and strong-willed, apparently fragile yet charged with inner force. Her port de bras strips away everything merely decorative, ornamental or conventionally “orientalist,” and becomes invested with intention and dramatic meaning. Her established stage rapport with Marque (they also danced “La Bayadère” together in 2022) gives their scenes an exceptional sense of harmony.

Act I brings this partnership to the fore. It is also the act in which Nureyev’s hand is most clearly felt, especially in Solor’s solos and in the ensemble scenes, such as the dance for Solor’s friends, almost folk in its accents and heelwork. Great energy came from the Hindu warriors, among whom Shale Wagman, the Golden Idol in the alternate cast, was impossible not to notice, and above all from Chun Wing Lam’s stunning fakir. With his jumps and feral presence, Lam brought a vivid sense of athleticism and, dramatically, an intense rapport with Solor. It was moving, too, to see him in his last role before leaving his dancing career behind. The Djampo dance, or scarf dance, was taken at too quick a tempo, so that it lost the slightly mysterious suspension it has in older recordings. Antonio Conforti, as the Slave in Nikiya’s pas de deux, turned a brief divertissement into one of the evening’s most refined moments, dancing with immaculate elegance.

Act II unfolds as a succession of divertissements: the fan dance, the parrot dance, the pas de quatre, the Golden Idol. As the Idol, Antoine Kirschner was splendid, statuesque and hieratic. The Danse Manou, in which a woman hides the contents of a jug from two little girls, the jug later turning out to be empty, was performed by an inspired and witty Marine Ganio, whose playful, almost maternal spirit towards the two young Opéra ballet students added a touch of metatheatre. Célia Drouy and Keita Bellali, in the Indian Dance, delivered one of the finest performances of the evening. Splendidly executed, refined and explosive at the same time, it was rightly greeted by the audience with a warm ovation.

Inès McIntosh’s Gamzatti entered like a true queen, entirely within the role, establishing from her first appearance an unquestionable dramatic authority. She reigned over the stage and towered over the other characters, while her jealousy over Solor remained strikingly human, almost everyday in its immediacy. Though the confrontation with Park’s Nikiya was perhaps a little too polite, the glorious pas d’action, a display of virtuosity originally placed in the now-lost fourth act, gave her and Marque the chance to shine in their respective variations and in their brilliant partnering. Park’s Nikiya is so ethereal that even her death appeared sweetly inevitable. Her best qualities, purity of line and outstanding technique, became essential in the most glorious, timeless and classically conceived act of the production: the Kingdom of the Shades.

Paul Marque and Sae Eun Park in “La Bayadère” by Rudolph Nureyev. Photograph by Yonathan Kellerman | OnP

The curtain rising on Act III had the audience whispering in awe. The fantastical stained-glass set, decorated with natural motifs, frames Solor, sunk in sorrow as he smokes his opium and drifts into his visions. The Kingdom of the Shades remains the production’s purest miracle, heightened by the absolute technical and visual perfection of the Paris Opera corps de ballet, impressive throughout the evening but here reaching extraordinary heights. Thirty-two dancers in haute couture tutus, subtly crossed by luminous diagonal stripes, enter one by one from the back of the stage, descending the inclined plane in a slow, hypnotic serpentine sequence of arabesque penchée, posé cambré and port de bras, until the entire stage is filled with the geometrical unison of a white, oneiric army.

It is only when Marque enters, searching for the shade of Nikiya, that the spirit and passion missing elsewhere begin to appear. The adagio pas de deux was beautifully executed, with the first violin contributing much of its emotional intensity. The three solo Shades offered three distinct qualities: Claire Mousseigne’s amplitude, Marine Ganio’s musicality and Nine Seropian’s brightness. All this confirmed how powerfully the Shades continue to function today precisely because of their abstraction, while the “Indian” acts require an extraordinary dramatic force to prevent their exoticism from appearing as dated artifice.

Koen Kessels conducted with elegance and clarity, bringing out the brilliance of Minkus’s score, whose polkas, waltzes and adagios are the ideal musical counterpart to choreography rooted in a nineteenth-century European fantasy of the “Orient”. The score is only one cog in the complex mechanism of Nureyev’s creation, where casting, décor, costumes, mime and atmosphere must lock together with absolute precision for the whole machine to function. But is the preservation of such a perfect mix still possible, or even desirable? The answer is found, ironically, in the evening’s own programme, where he is quoted as saying: “Un ouvrage de théâtre doit sans cesse évoluer. Sinon, il est mort, il est comme une pièce de musée sous sa vitrine, qui ne mérite pas de durer.” A theatrical work must evolve if it is not to become a museum piece unworthy of survival.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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Idol Dreams

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

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