Act II opens to the looming presence of Notre-Dame’s bells, with which Quasimodo dances, evoking the singular and almost intimate bond he shares with them in Hugo’s novel. His solitary dance is followed by Esmeralda’s entrance. Awkward in both body and spirit, Quasimodo is met by her with a beauty, patience and affection that open him to a new form of love and self-knowledge. In turn, he gradually draws her into his own universe, until their two worlds begin to converge. She falls asleep in his arms as he cradles her, rocking her back and forth like a bell. She seems finally safe, but the news arrives that the asylum offered by the cathedral is revoked. The corps de ballet, dressed in black and wearing enormous wigs, invades the space like a nightmare, violently breaking the idyll. Esmeralda is dragged away and led to the pillory. As death approaches, the corps’ hands convulse and tremble. The ballet ends with Esmeralda and Frollo lying dead on the floor, the crowd collapsing around them and sealing the tragedy. 

Those expecting a classical or neoclassical ballet will be disabused. The choreography is unmistakably Petit, marked by angular arms, a linear and geometric organisation, an emphatic use of the hands, complex lifts and spectacular décalés, wide gestures and a strongly expressionist theatricality. The ensemble scenes are especially disconcerting at first, unfolding in recurring waves of heightened dramatic energy. Unaccustomed at the time to the modernity of the choreography, the dancers were initially reluctant to perform movements unprecedented in the company’s vocabulary. They move laterally across the stage, creating collective patterns and isolating body parts (legs, arms), before regrouping at the centre to form a dense mass in which dynamic forces converge at key moments of the plot.

From a dramaturgical perspective, what stands out most sharply is the relationship between Frollo and Esmeralda, which today would readily be described as toxic, defined by passion, denial, coercion and violence. Frollo’s brutality, particularly at the beginning of Act II, is presented in a didactic and literal manner that feels overly direct by contemporary standards. Likewise, the women who seduce Phoebus in Act I appear as caricatures of prostitutes, their exaggerated physicality (padded breasts included!) underscoring how certain aspects of the ballet have not aged well. Violence and seduction are now more often approached choreographically through suggestion and displacement, in oblique and metaphorical ways. The music-hall inflections of the score, too, are unlikely to flatter contemporary sensibilities. What was strikingly new at the time of the ballet’s creation can today feel all too familiar, even redundant.

And yet, as with all stories of love and death, and thanks to the magisterial commitment of the entire cast, “Notre-Dame de Paris” retains a powerful ability to captivate. For all its excesses and dated elements, it remains a work of undeniable theatrical force, a distillate of French identity and culture.