Sculptural Lines

The idea of bringing together the Louvre’s Michel-Ange / Rodin. Corps vivants exhibition, on view from mid-April to late July, and an evening of pas de deux danced by Paris Opéra Ballet soloists is so wonderfully potpourri-like that it invites reflection even where reflection may not have been the point. The aim seemed rather to create an exclusive, almost ceremonial event beneath the glass Pyramid. In that suspended nocturnal space, the duos appeared like visions, and a strange sense of displacement and questioning emerged precisely from the unusual composition of elements assembled: dance, music, architecture, sculpture, and night-time Paris.

Performance

Paris Opera Ballet: excerpts from Hans van Manen’s “Trois Gnossiennes,” Frederick Ashton's “Rhapsody,” Angelin Preljocaj's “Le Parc,” and Yvon Demol’s “Supercorps”

Place

Louvre Museum, Paris, April 19, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Guillaume Diop and Dorothée Gilbert at the Louvre Museum. Photograph by Maria-Helena Buckley | OnP

The evening opened with Hans van Manen’s “Trois Gnossiennes,” choreographed in 1982 for Dutch National Ballet and brought into the Paris Opéra Ballet repertoire in 2017. Van Manen created a duet of quiet tension, perfectly attuned to the strange clarity of Satie’s three modal pieces, in which repetition and variation create an atmosphere of unresolved mystery, very much like the one suggested by the evening itself. The pale blue tones of the dancers’ costumes seemed to echo the sea-blue of Honfleur in Normandy, Satie’s birthplace, while the choreography drew on that same mystery, with subtle patterns and deviations, and minimal, linear steps, gradually growing towards a more intimate and intense relationship between the two dancers. Léonore Baulac and Hugo Marchand, replacing the injured Guillaume Diop, traced an elegant lacework of steps that seemed to rhyme with the crystalline geometry of the Pyramid. What made the performance remarkable was their musicality: at moments, it seemed as though Elena Bonnay’s piano were emerging from the dancers’ bodies themselves.

Léonore Baulac and Hugo Marchand in Hans van Manen’s “Trois Gnossiennes.” Photograph courtesy OnP

“Rhapsody,” choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton in 1980, has a deliciously understated royal origin: an eightieth-birthday tribute to the Queen Mother. Created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, then guesting with the Royal Ballet, and Lesley Collier as the central couple, the pas de deux, often performed as an excerpt, staged a fascinating encounter between Russian virtuosity and British refinement. Ashton’s classicism rests on beauty, rigour, and harmony, but remains open to melancholy and emotional release. Silvia Saint-Martin and Marc Moreau were excellent interpreters in what they do best: she, almost glacial in her technical assurance, with an astonishing beauty of line and movement; he, an exceptionally skilful dancer and generous partner, who brought a welcome softness to the duet. And yet, the performance preserved the brilliance and control of the work more fully than its poetic breadth, and this deeper transport did not always come through. This impression was reinforced by the visual frame: unlike the Royal Ballet’s return to William Chappell’s original aesthetic, the Paris Opéra Ballet version uses Patrick Caulfield’s designs, whose golden yellow and deep red palette gives the work a more emphatically graphic quality, one that seems to hold back its sense of abandon and emotional overflow. What was missing, perhaps, was that breathing virtuosity that gives the pas de deux its moving character. Once again, the live music, performed by an ensemble of four strings, three winds, and piano from the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris, beautifully rendered the sweeping lyricism of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”

The musical enchantment continued with the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, which seemed to carry the whole world of Angelin Preljocaj’s “Le Parc” into the Louvre and draw everything towards the famous whirlwind kiss. Unlike the preceding Ashton excerpt, this was Paris Opéra Ballet territory in the most unmistakable sense, entirely at home in its own legend. Whenever Dorothée Gilbert and Hugo Marchand meet on stage, or wherever else they dance, the air seems to shift. Their performance in the Place de la Bastille during the Olympic Torch Relay in July 2024 had already shown that this kind of alchemy can work in any setting. There is a rare quality in this couple: a complete fit, a mutual resonance shaped by a long history of dancing together, but also by a grace that seems to arrive from elsewhere, beyond control and almost beyond the human. Everything felt precise, but carried by that kind of ease that makes beauty look inevitable. The fact that the pas de deux was extracted from the ballet did not diminish its impact at all; rather the opposite. One was left thinking, perhaps unfairly but irresistibly, that “Le Parc” is this duo, and that all other versions are, somehow, copies.

Dorothée Gilbert and Hugo Marchand in Angelin Preljocaj's “Le Parc.” Photograph courtesy OnP

Yvon Demol’s new creation “Supercorps” brought the evening back to its sculptural motif. It began with a striking scenographic choice, placing the dancers on the helical stairway descending into the space beneath the Pyramid. Demol had already shown his choreographic imagination through works created for Incidence Chorégraphique since 2015, and more recently in the Paris Opéra’s Danseurs chorégraphes initiative in 2025 and 2026. His style is intensely physical and tactile, with a strong sculptural instinct, and in this context it felt particularly convincing. Hohyun Kang and Demol himself, replacing the initially announced Antoine Kirscher, appeared in geometric costumes whose square motifs recalled both the metallic structure of the Pyramid and the measured study of sculptural form. Set to a striking mix of Beethoven and Michel Dietlin, the work imagined the two dancers as statues coming to life, their inert substance gradually animated by mutual contact. The only moment that felt less convincing was the entrance of the other soloists, repeating some of their own pas de deux sequences. Whether or not this was Demol’s own choice, it briefly pulled the atmosphere closer to a rather generic gala showcase and loosened the intensity of the pas de deux. The central idea, however, remained strong. Of all the pieces in the evening, “Supercorps” was the one that most directly conversed with the exhibition: the unfinished, the muscles, the shape and force of the body, and the carving of emotion out of raw matter.

Hohyun Kang and Yvon Demol in Demol’s “Supercorps.” Photograph courtesy OnP

After the ballet, the audience became visitors to the exhibition, left to wander through the galleries in the exclusive atmosphere of the Louvre by night. It was then that the programme’s relation to the exhibition appeared perhaps more atmospheric than conceptual, much like the link between Rodin and Michelangelo itself: something born from admiration and inspiration rather than from any direct or linear connection. The exhibition explores the creative dialogue Rodin sustained with his predecessor, especially through the anatomy of the human body, understood as a study of power and torment, suffering and liberation. The encounter between Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and Rebellious Slave and Rodin’s The Age of Bronze and The Thinker, together with works by other artists, from Daniele da Volterra’s sixteenth-century bust of Michelangelo to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s nineteenth-century sculptural groups, as well as limbs, fragments, and sketches, enhanced the exhibition’s composite character. In this sense, the evening’s dance programme became another form of assemblage. The beauty of each part sometimes distracted from the whole, but perhaps this was also the charm of the evening: it did not offer a cohesive thesis, but a creative composition of beautiful fragments.

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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