Smoke and Mirrors

Vibrations” closes the Opéra Garnier’s 2025/26 season with what might be read as a triptych on dance’s future, past, and present. Bringing together three artists from different generations and creative worlds, the programme places the new pulse of the eclectic, hip-hop-rooted Micaela Taylor alongside the towering legacy of Mats Ek, a living monument of dance, and the beguiling world of Crystal Pite, whose work has deservedly become so dear to audiences today.

Performance

Paris Opera Ballet: “Dreams This Way” by Micaela Taylor / “Solo for Two” by Mats Ek / “The Seasons’ Canon” by Crystal Pite

Place

Opéra Garnier, Paris, France, July 7, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Amandine Albisson and Pablo Legasa in “Solo for Two” by Mats Ek. Photograph by Julien Benhamou | OnP

Micaela Taylor’s “Dreams This Way,” a world premiere for the Paris Opera Ballet, introduced the company to the Los Angeles-based choreographer and founder of the TL Collective, known for developing Expand Practice, an athletic vocabulary rooted in hip-hop and classical dance that opens onto a highly personal idiom. The piece is set to a score specially composed by Tru, the stage name of Philip Patrick Harper Bucknor, combining experimental electronic textures with spoken word. It began promisingly: five figures in office attire appeared in what seemed to be an anonymous corporate lobby, framed by an elevator, an array of chairs and a suspended atmosphere of expectation. Yet that initial tension quickly dissipated. As the mid-stage curtain rose, the piece settled into predictable choices: conventional group formations, repetitive unison patterns and the all-too-familiar contemporary-dance trope of nude-coloured underwear as shorthand for liberation from social norms.

The disappointment was that Taylor did not bring to the Palais Garnier the distinctive voice evident in creations such as “Lights, Camera, Dismantled” (2023), created for NDT 2, or the striking Lost (2024), her dance film for the CLI Conservatory. The abrupt shifts in atmosphere, emotional inventiveness and unexpected movement vocabulary that make those works so compelling were largely absent here. What ultimately sustained the piece was the extraordinary commitment of the dancers, who gave it rhythm, precision and dramatic momentum. However unfair it may be to single out only a few names, Letizia Galloni once again demonstrated her remarkable versatility, while Caroline Osmont and Ida Viikinkoski confirmed themselves as interpreters capable of changing the temperature of a performance. Among the men, Loup Marcault-Derouard stood out, as always, for his intensity, as did Éric Pinto Cata, recently promoted into the corps de ballet.

The lingering regret is that Taylor did not place the exceptional technical abilities of the Paris Opera Ballet dancers in genuine dialogue with what she does best, and where her originality most powerfully lies: a visceral, free, street-inflected physicality that disregards stylistic categories and resists over-intellectualised tropes.

Paris Opera Ballet in “Dreams This Way” by Micaela Taylor. Photograph by Julien Benhamou | OnP

Mats Ek’s “Solo for Two” is an impressive work based on Smoke, his wonderful 1995 dance film featuring Sylvie Guillem and his brother Niklas Ek. Adapted for the stage the following year, it now enters the Paris Opera Ballet repertoire three decades later. The complex video construction and trompe-l’œil perspectives of Smoke are inevitably difficult to translate: here, a large wall pierced by a door stands midstage, almost suspended, while a steep staircase on the right becomes a kind of springboard into the void. Ek’s theatrical intelligence, nourished by his profound engagement with literature and music, is enhanced by his choice of Arvo Pärt’s score, whose luminous beauty seems to breathe with the choreography. It was all the more regrettable, then, that the music was not performed live.

The piece is delicate, poetic, absurd and lovingly grotesque. It revolves around a couple: their troubles, their intimacy and their inability either fully to merge or to exist separately. The title captures the central paradox of the piece: two people attempting the difficult task of inhabiting a single life. Midway through the piece, they undress and exchange clothes, a gesture that seals an essential equality between them.

The memory of Guillem and Ek inevitably provides a daunting point of comparison for any duo, and Amandine Albisson and Pablo Legasa did not always seem able to withstand it, nor did they appear entirely at ease within Ek’s singular language. Their partnership remained somewhat reserved, without fully revealing the emotional intimacy and unsettling tension embedded in the movement. With Stéphane Bullion having taken his farewell in Ek’s “Another Place” in 2022 and Ludmila Pagliero leaving the stage after “Appartement” in 2025, two particularly compelling interpreters of the great Swedish choreographer’s world are no longer active within the company. This performance suggested how difficult such a distinctive heritage can be to transmit, even when entrusted to dancers of such remarkable calibre.

Albisson and Legasa approached the task with care and precision, but some of its gestures seemed to remain on the surface. The more angular, almost alienated movements did not always gather their full underlying tension, while the more explosive passages retained a degree of restraint. Their dancing preserved an academic control where Ek’s work demands a dialectical relationship with classical training: not its abandonment, but its distortion, in order to reach the liminal territory characteristic of his work, a vision of humanity as a rope stretched above an abyss, between the sublime and the most elementary instincts.

Silvia Saint-Martin and Jérémy-Loup Quer in “The Seasons’ Canon” by Crystal Pite. Photograph by Julien Benhamou | OnP

“The Seasons’ Canon” poses a similar problem of reworking a masterpiece, this time through music. Max Richter’s 2012 “Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons” has inspired a number of choreographers to respond: just to name a few, Wayne McGregor in “Kairos” for Ballett Zürich in 2014, Ilya Zhivoi in “The Four Seasons,” created for the Mariinsky Theatre in 2017, and, more recently, Robert Bondara in “4 Seasons” for the Czech National Ballet in 2026. Crystal Pite’s creative genius did not resist the temptation: in 2016, she created “The Seasons’ Canon,” her first work for the Paris Opera Ballet, turning Richter’s theatrical score into a living choreographic form.

In this sense, the title proves apt: the whole chain of heritage becomes a canon of transmission. Vivaldi’s music is built on modular patterns and recurring structures; Richter recuperates and amplifies that logic, and Pite responds to it with sequences that are themselves modular, almost fractal. The problem is that the choreography is so strong that it exposes the music’s weaknesses. Richter’s recomposition, for all its effectiveness, often seems to turn Vivaldi’s already overfamiliar score into something even more immediately accessible: blatantly emotional, predictable, and at times almost demagogic. Pite’s work accommodates itself to this structure, yet does so with such artistry, craft, and commitment that the result remains undeniably stunning, as the prolonged standing ovation confirmed. This is why one cannot help feeling that, with a score of deeper substance, perhaps even Vivaldi’s original music played live by the Opéra orchestra, her artistic imagination might have reached unexplored peaks.

Pite has spoken of emotion and the relationship with nature as central to her attraction to Richter’s version. The piece pays homage to nature’s force, in the feral intensity of the dancers’ bodies and against Jay Gower Taylor’s reflected-light backdrop, conceived in collaboration with lighting designer Tom Visser, which creates a glowing presence that feels almost alive. Dancers in wide trousers, with a sharp blue mark drawn around their necks, produced intense choral images. The beauty of the piece lies in its impressive composition of lines and forces: Pite’s command of group architecture is overwhelming, her duets and solos remarkably rich, and the way she modulates female and male groups in their differences conveys a rare vitality. The corps de ballet offered a magnificent demonstration of its phenomenal strength, moving like distinct limbs of a single organism, carried along by the same current of power, and the effect was magical. Yet the real revelation came from Roxane Stojanov: in the Autumn section, she gave a truly outstanding performance, transformed almost beyond recognition, revealing with striking force the full extent of her gifts as one of the company’s brightest étoiles and as an artist one now hopes to see more often in contemporary roles.

And so the 2026 season comes to an end with a programme that gathers together the heritage and possible futures of an institution whose choices are not always easy to read. Yet perhaps part of the Opéra’s fascination lies precisely there: in its anachronisms, its enigmas, and its attempts to inhabit a present that has itself become difficult to decipher on every level.

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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