Toward Azure Distances

On a bright spring afternoon, as Paris basked in long-awaited sunlight and the city frantically moved in the heat, the Opéra Garnier opened a portal to another world—a realm of eternal forms, ethereal beauty, and blue distances: those trembling horizons where the sea dissolves into sky, and the eye reaches toward the infinite. The Paris Opera Ballet School unveiled a triptych of choreographic visions, each an inquiry into the ideal—a glimpse into a distant, immaterial dimension: essential, incorporeal, and immune to time. In this spirit, the afternoon’s programme unfolded: beginning with Antony Tudor’s “Continuo” (1971), an Anglo-American neoclassical gem; flowing into the effervescent brilliance of August Bournonville, with excerpts from “Flower Festival in Genzano” (1858) and “Napoli” (1842); and culminating in the archetypal Greece of Maurice Béjart’s “Seven Greek Dances” (1983). Challenged by formidable technical and interpretative demands, the young dancers responded with lucid precision, musical elegance, and a refined expressivity. These are the hallmarks of the School—a three-hundred-year legacy nurtured with continued care and vision by the former étoile Élisabeth Platel. Only days earlier, at the première of the Spectacle de l’École de Danse on 24th April, she had been awarded the insignia of Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Mérite by Brigitte Lefèvre—a richly deserved honour on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of her directorship.

Performance

The Paris Opera Ballet School Performance

Place

Palais Garnier, Paris, France, April 27, 2025

Words

Elsa Simonetti

Ecole de Danse de l'Opéra de Paris in “Continuo” by Antony Tudor. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff | OnP

The curtain rose on “Continuo,” heralding its debut in the School’s repertoire—a distilled study in abstraction, shaped by Tudor’s sculptural and introspective vocabulary, composed with British restraint, yet softened by an American lyricism. Created for the New York Juilliard School as a pedagogical tool, the piece remains a litmus test of classical discipline—a masterclass in phrasing, partnership, and expressive restraint. The cast danced with exquisite sensitivity: Jeanne Larchevêque and Camillo Petochi, Albane de Chantérac with Milo Mills, and Alyssia Ferreira-Casevecchie with Achille Delaleu-Rosenthal wove through its modular variations with organic fluidity. Transitions dissolved weightlessly, gestures drawn toward some distant, azure horizon—echoed in the pale blue of the costumes. The ballet’s continuous motion progressed to the notes of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, whose repetitions and gentle shifts mirror the choreography’s structure—each phrase rising like a breath held just long enough to feel its tension, then released into the score’s quiet, relentless tide.

The rhythmic thread of Pachelbel’s score was deftly sustained by Maria Seletskaja, now an orchestral conductor having previously had an international career as a soloist dancer. Her rapport with the corps de ballet revealed a lucid sensitivity and an instinctive grasp of musical phrasing in relation to movement. These same qualities flowed naturally into the sparkling scores of Helsted, Paulli, Lumbye, and Gade—music imbued with the buoyant charm so characteristic of Bournonville’s world.

Ecole de Danse de l'Opéra de Paris in “Continuo” by Antony Tudor. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff | OnP

The set thus unfolded into a realm of luminous joy, chromatic vitality, and timeless popular charm — the essence of Bournonville’s idealized vision of Italy. The “Flower Festival in Genzano” pas de deux offered a graceful showcase for Manon Baranger, whose profound understanding of the idiom and alert musicality emerged in soaring développés, floated arabesques, and controlled balances—imbued with poised sweetness. Carlo Zarcone proved an attentive partner: supple ports de bras and a calmly held torso above buoyant batterie captured the Danish style’s understated masculine elegance. Their romantic interplay achieved a pleasing coherence, recalling the Copenhagen Ballet School’s interpretation at last year’s Gala des Écoles. The “Napoli” pas de six and tarantella highlighted crisp footwork: precise entrechats, floating brisés volés, and lightning-fast grand jetés. Camillo Petochi impressed with his explosive allegro, while Marcos Silva Sousa brought a charismatic energy that lit up the stage. Hadrien Moulin distinguished himself through clean athleticism and elegant phrasing. The dancers’ embrace of Bournonville’s flashes of flirtation, joy, and bravura was striking, even if some rigidity in upper-body carriage betrayed the style’s distance from French training. Barbara Creutz-Pachiaudi’s set completed the illusion: Vesuvius rising in the background, dissolving into a painted azure horizon.

Ecole de Danse de l'Opéra de Paris in “Napoli” by August Bournonville. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff | OnP

The Gulf of Naples gave way to a luminous rectangular plane of light blue at the back of the stage, onto which the dancers emerged for the closing piece: “Seven Greek Dances,” Maurice Béjart’s introspective, intense, and radiant homage to Greece. A work that does not merely transcend folklore, but forges a shared, mythic gesture—channeling the quintessential essence of Greek spirit and tradition. Here, the purity of classical sculpture becomes a living symbolism, forging—as Béjart put it—a universal language of freedom, resistance, and shared humanity. The corps de ballet performed with heartfelt generosity: swirling like seabirds in geometric formations, then dissolving into clusters, and finally moving like silhouettes from Attic vase painting. The women alternated refined pointe work with grounded barefoot sequences, animating Béjart’s deconstructed classical vocabulary. Theodorakis’s mercurial shifts in tempo—from rembetiko’s soulful hesitation to sirtaki’s vital pulse—were rendered with instinct and sensitivity. The duets brought nuance and tension: Nael Dimbas and Carlo Zarcone stood out for their detail and tone, as did the lyrical rapport between Prune Kaufmann and Hadrien Moulin. Two soloists showcased emerging authority and magnetism: Marc-Anthony Betta Ndabo and Ilyane Bel-Lahsen filled the space with sculpted grace and quiet intensity.

Marc-Anthony Betta Ndabo in “Seven Greek Dances” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff

Watching this captivating ensemble, one could hardly believe these were the same students of the Première and Deuxième Division who, just hours earlier, had been quietly working through pliés and relevés in open class at the Palais Garnier—dressed in practice clothes, focused, all business. By afternoon, a metamorphosis: the precision of the studio had become mature stage presence—vibrant, expansive, unforced. The French academic language had emerged as a form fully lived, exact yet flexible—instilled through the teachers’ unwavering dedication and the long, unseen labour of daily class. These young artists moved seamlessly between aesthetic worlds, bringing a quality both rare and necessary: immediacy, sincerity, and a diversity of bodies, dynamics, and interpretations—something not yet fully echoed in the company today, but vividly present in this performance, lending it its pulse. In their performance, the ideal and the real no longer stood apart, but moved in harmony—embodied in the presence and promise of a new generation’s artistry.

Elsa 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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