Marcos Morau’s “Étude” reflects on images and their infinite reproducibility as these are bound up with the process of rehearsal and, more deeply still, with the bending of the body to the demands of art, inviting us to think of performance itself as a process of production. A dancer, Laurène Lévy, appears slightly lost before the curtain in the bare light of the theatre, repeating in slow motion the codified, ritualised gestures of a classical bow. In her ecru tutu and with a huge bouquet in her arms, everything about her appearance is perfectly balletic except for the knee-high socks.

Behind a black veil hanging from above, spectral copies of her gradually emerge, men and women dressed identically in costumes splendidly designed by Silvia Delagneau, as though in a nightmare of endless repetition applied to theatrical form. The iconic curtain of the Palais Garnier, the original dating from 1875 and designed by Jean-Baptiste Lavastre and Auguste Rubé at Charles Garnier’s own request, already contains a captivating visual illusion: it is a wooden structure painted to resemble draped fabric, a technique chosen because real velvet on that scale would have been too heavy and would have dulled the acoustics of the room. Max Glaenzel, the set designer, extends this logic by reproducing the painted curtain twice more, each successive version slightly more faded, so that scenic space itself becomes subject to multiplication.

The score, created expressly by Gustave Rudman in collaboration with Morau, elusive and rhythmically abrasive, accompanies, disperses, and reshapes the rehearsal-like vocabulary of stretching, warming up, and technical exercises performed by all twenty-nine dancers around a circular red-velvet barre, now without tutus and dressed in overalls. Andrea Fàbregas’s bright lighting heightens the plasticity of movement and the sculptural tension of poses held against gravity.

One of the strongest moments comes when, after the barre has disappeared, an enormous reproduction of Garnier’s chandelier is lowered before the astonished ensemble. They seem almost to venerate it, opening and closing around it like the petals of a vast flower, themselves rendered interchangeable within a single ceremonial mechanism. The chandelier lights up like a heartbeat while the dancers yield to excited, tightly coordinated movements touched by theatrical excess. As the music intensifies and the chandelier begins to oscillate, the work reaches a strange fever pitch.

At the end, the stage is flooded with light as the rear of the stage opens onto the gilded, almost adytum-like space so rarely seen: the famous Foyer de la Danse, opening the visual field to a depth of almost fifty metres. In a game of mirrors, part of the rear set reflects both the enormous reproduced chandelier and the real one hanging at the centre of the theatre, creating an infinite mise en abyme. What follows is a strange, dreamlike procession in which the women in tutus form diagonal lines of force directed towards the back of the stage, subverting the traditional Paris Opéra’s défilé. The piece leaves us with unsettling questions: who is watching, and who is performing? Is going to the theatre not itself a kind of performance, a codified collective act?