Notre-Dame de Paris

If Notre-Dame remains one of the enduring symbols of Paris, standing at the city’s heart in all its beauty, much of the credit belongs to Victor Hugo. His 1831 novel not only prompted the cathedral’s restoration but reclaimed it as a living emblem of the city. The book inspired numerous stage adaptations, ballet among them. As early as 1844, “La Esmeralda” was created in London by Jules Perrot for Carlotta Grisi, to music by Cesare Pugni. The work currently on the stage of the Opéra Bastille springs from a similar impulse. In 1965, at a moment when the Paris Opéra was cautiously opening itself to modernity, its then director Georges Auric commissioned a new ballet from Roland Petit. A graduate of the Paris Opéra Ballet School some twenty years earlier, Petit had by then reached the height of his international success. After some reflection, he turned to Hugo’s novel, rediscovering in it a richness and dramatic potential ideally suited to the stage.

Performance

Paris Opera Ballet: “Notre-Dame de Paris” by Roland Petit

Place

Opéra Bastille, Paris, France, December 10, 2025

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Roxane Stojanov in “Notre-Dame de Paris” by Roland Petit. Photograph by Yonathan Kellerman | OnP

“Notre-Dame de Paris” was conceived as a total work of art, in which dance, music, costumes and scenography were developed in close dialogue. The narrative was reduced to its essentials, in an effort to preserve only the tragic permanence of Hugo’s masterpiece. This principle of abstraction and sobriety was shared by René Allio, whose monumental sets allude to the medieval age through linear, stylised forms, stripped of gargoyles and decorative excess. Yves Saint Laurent designed geometric, essential costumes, choosing chromatic contrast as a primary mode of expression and famously colouring them “like the stained glass of the cathedral.” The score by film composer Maurice Jarre, by contrast, lends the ballet an almost blockbuster quality.

The story of the people of Paris in 1482 is transposed into two acts and thirteen tableaux and centred on five main figures. Esmeralda, a young street dancer of captivating beauty, is deprived of the novel’s naïve spirit and becomes a knowingly seductive presence. The only dancer en pointe, she is the focus of the differing forms of desire nurtured by the three male protagonists: Quasimodo, a troubled yet tender figure, originally performed by Roland Petit himself; Frollo, the malevolent archdeacon, who emerges as a portrait of nervous restraint and inner turmoil, withdrawn from the world and consumed by frustration and torment; and Phoebus, a captain of the guards, a handsome blond peacock whose Mondrian-inspired costume accentuates a showy masculinity.

The final and most central character is the people of Notre-Dame, embodied by the corps de ballet, which functions like a chorus in Greek tragedy: at once a resonating chamber for the principal events and a presence with its own voice and weight, thus redefining the internal geometry between characters. Another trait shared with Greek tragedy lies in the way each character’s entrance alters the temperature and microcosm of the scene.

Roxane Stojanov and Antonio Conforti in “Notre-Dame de Paris” by Roland Petit. Photograph by Yonathan Kellerman | OnP

The corps de ballet floods the stage as Act I opens, forming a vibrant, colourful mass animated by playful vitality in celebration of the Feast of Fools. When Quasimodo enters, he momentarily eclipses the ensemble: the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame is soon crowned “Pope of Fools.” Jérémy-Loup Quer emphasises Quasimodo’s vulnerability and inner gentleness, lending him the air of a pierrot lunaire. He embodies the role with masterful assurance, navigating a technically demanding part that requires the contraction and distortion of the body while executing highly complex steps. The ensemble then freezes in the presence of Frollo. An excellent dancer, Thomas Docquir gives the archdeacon a tightly wound physicality, conveying both gravitas and penitence, and rendering his rancorous repression with remarkable artistry. Frollo’s heart is torn when he catches sight of Esmeralda, the object of his obsessive desire. Roxane Stojanov embodies Esmeralda’s bohemian sensuality in a playful and free manner, both provocative and deeply seductive, heightening her allure.

The scene suddenly turns entirely red, as do the costumes of the corps de ballet, as we are drawn into the nocturnal underworld of Paris, the Court of Miracles: a chaotic humanity of beggars, outcasts and criminals who reign over the neighbourhood by night. The sets shift and recombine, creating staircases and trapdoors, suggesting a labyrinthine underground world inhabited by unruly crowds. Quasimodo pursues Esmeralda under Frollo’s orders, but she is saved by Phoebus and his soldiers.

Phoebus, convincingly danced by Antonio Conforti, is portrayed as a hedonist, drawn to pleasure, success and tavern life. He appears less a romantic hero than a figure driven by self-display and hollow seduction, shameless and faintly vulgar. His luxurious nature emerges both through the intrinsic quality of his movement and through the theatrical framing of the scene, notably the intervention of secondary characters: a group of women who surround him in an overt display of sensuality. They tease and undress him, preparing the ground for a highly charged pas de deux with Esmeralda. An unsettling pas de trois between Frollo, Esmeralda, and Phoebus erupts into sudden violence. Phoebus is struck down by the jealous Frollo, yet it is Esmeralda who is accused of the crime. Condemned for debauchery, homicide and witchcraft, she is led to the pillory erected on the Place de Grève (today’s Place de l’Hôtel de Ville). At the last moment, she is rescued by Quasimodo and taken into sanctuary within Notre-Dame. Frollo remains in the shadows, jealous and scheming.

Roxane Stojanov and Jérémy-Loup Quer in “Notre-Dame de Paris” by Roland Petit. Photograph by Yonathan Kellerman | OnP

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.

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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If Notre-Dame remains one of the enduring symbols of Paris, standing at the city’s heart in all its beauty, much of the credit belongs to Victor Hugo.