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Strong Foundations

The Sun King not only invented ballet in its modern form but in 1713 also founded the oldest ballet academy in the world. Today’s Paris Opera Ballet School, initially intended for the professional dancers of the Académie royale de Musique, has preserved through the centuries its founding principles of free tuition, selective admission and a rigorously structured system of examinations. It is with the pride born of this long and glorious tradition that the school’s much loved director since 2004, Élisabeth Platel, introduces the Démonstrations, a tradition initiated by Claude Bessy, the School’s historic director from 1972 to 2004, with the immutable aplomb of a great ballerina.

Performance

Démonstrations de l’École de danse de l’Opéra de Paris

Place

Palais Garnier, Paris, France, December 5 and 14, 2025

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Sixth Division students of the Paris Opera Ballet School with teacher Stephan Bullion in Démonstrations. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff | OnP

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Her profound attachment to the institution, her deeply moving, almost maternal care for the pupils, and her passion for the art and history the school represents transpire through every word, as she takes us by the hand, awed spectators, and leads us into both the beauty and the demands of the school’s pedagogical path. Platel embodies this continuity when she reminds us that the exercises the students are performing today are the very ones on which their masters trained before them. She then frames the Démonstrations in a simple yet eloquent way: “Ce n’est pas du ballet, mais c’est de la danse.” It is not ballet, but it is dance.

The Paris Opera Ballet School is organised into six divisions, from the youngest pupils in sixth division to those on the threshold of a professional career in first division. Training is centered on classical dance and complemented by disciplines such as contemporary dance, character dance, music, anatomy, dance history and dance law. Alongside artistic instruction, students pursue a full general education, allowing them to complete their schooling while training at the highest level. The final divisions prepare selected students for possible entry into the Paris Opera Ballet, while also leading to a nationally recognised professional diploma.

The Démonstrations were divided into two programmes, with all classes accompanied live by the school’s pianists. The first programme presented the sixth to fourth divisions, progressing from the youngest pupils to the intermediate levels. Alongside classical classwork, it included introductory excerpts in folklore and Baroque dance, contemporary dance, mime, character dance and musical expression, offering a broad view of the foundations of the school’s training.

Students of the Paris Opera Ballet School's Third Division in Démonstrations, taught by Nolwenn Daniel. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff | OnP

The youngest classes, the sixth division under twelve and the fifth division under thirteen, work on port de bras, classical French épaulement and their first combinations, while beginning to master what will later become their respective specialities. For the girls, this means adagio and precise, energetic footwork, while the boys focus on turns and allegro. In the fourth division, one already sees fine tours en l’air for the boys and an exquisite use of pointe for the girls, with increasingly complex centre combinations. Classical dance is taught in separate girls’ and boys’ classes, under the guidance of teachers who include figures such as Karl Paquette and the recently retired, much loved étoile Stéphane Bullion. 

Boys and girls then come together as the youngest pupils from the sixth and fifth divisions appear in folk dance through a series of traditional French forms. These include a Baroque pas and more popular dances such as the demanding valse à cinq temps. The second division then delights with an introduction to Martha Graham technique, led by Graham School graduate Iris Florentiny. Through barre à terre and centre combinations, the students reveal an artistic maturity, marked by depth of expression and musical sensitivity. The mime class from the fifth division fills the Palais Garnier with sweetness, as the children embody growing trees and the characters of an imaginary picnic with disarming imagination and precision. This is followed by a lively character dance for the youngest pupils, in vivid red costumes inspired by Italian dances, sarabanda and passacaglia, emphasising rhythm, musicality and group coordination. Finally, Scott Alan Prouty’s musical expression class proves the real icing on the cake. Singing and performing in a miniature musical entitled “Les petits rats de l’Opéra,” the traditional nickname for the School’s youngest pupils, born of their tireless scurrying through the corridors of the Palais Garnier, the children display striking acting and vocal abilities. They then gather together on stage for a joyful sung conclusion.

Fourth Division students of the Paris Opera Ballet School in Démonstrations. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff | OnP

The second programme shifts to the third through first divisions, where technical demands and stylistic refinement markedly intensify. The performance on Sunday 14 December was proudly designated as a Rêves d’enfants matinée, a forty-year-old initiative that enables hundreds of children from social centres and care homes across the Île-de-France to experience the Paris Opera, thanks to the long-standing commitment of Arop, the Opera’s principal philanthropic association. This project also supports young talents in training, from aspiring musicians to pupils of the Ballet School.

What emerges most strikingly from this programme is the teachers’ talkativeness, as they do not refrain from offering corrections in front of the public, and the students’ gracious ability to receive them and adapt, like true professionals in the making. Their increasingly clear and assured technical placement is refined with age until it becomes quietly mesmerizing. Among the teachers, one encounters further legends of the Paris Opéra, including Carole Arbo, Wilfried Romoli and Fabienne Cerutti, who takes this occasion to bid farewell to her teaching role. Coordination exercises, pas de bourrée for the girls, particularly rich and complex in the French tradition, and the steady acquisition of musicality and strength through repetition structure the work.

Second Division students of the Paris Opera Ballet School in Démonstrations, taught by Fabienne Cerutti. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff | OnP

Yann Saïz proves a true creature of the stage, instantly engaging through his warmth and rhetorical flair, as he offers his second division boys exercises drawn from the traditions of Claude Bessy and Alexander Pushkin, the famed teacher of Mikhail Baryshnikov. The third division students then reunite for character dance, this time performing a gigue alongside other Irish-inspired folklore. The programme concludes with pas de deux and demanding lifts, as teachers continue to guide and encourage dancers who already appear on the brink of professional maturity.

The beauty of this tradition, together with the Director of Dance José Martinez’s recent initiative of bringing the Paris Opéra Ballet company’s morning classes onto the Opéra Bastille, lies in the way it reminds us, in the very place of performance, of the work, fatigue, sacrifice, rigour and daily commitment that stand behind the beauty these dancers unfailingly offer us. It also recalls a fundamental truth about dance: technique must be learned in order to be forgotten. Yet when dancers forget technique, there is always the danger that we, as spectators, forget the labour that brought them there. What unfolds here, however, is more than that. It is the portrait of an institution that continually reaffirms its purpose, its vitality and its profound legitimacy to exist, to endure through the centuries, and to be supported.

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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