In Contrasting Light

The “Contrastes” evening is one of the Paris Opéra Ballet’s increasingly frequent ventures into non-classical choreographic territory. True to its title, it unfolds as an evening of contrasts. Trisha Brown’s “O złożony, O composite” and “If You Couldn’t See Me” open the programme, where classical and postmodern languages intersect, as do presence and disappearance, visibility and its refusal. The programme then turns to two contemporary creations: David Dawson’s “Anima Animus,” which unfolds in black and white and is built on stark oppositions, and Marne and Imre van Opstal’s “Driftwood,” which explores the tension between the individual and the collective. Taken together, the four works offer radically different visions of what choreographic creation can be.

Performance

Paris Opera Ballet: Trisha Brown’s “O złożony, O composite” and “If You Couldn’t See Me” / David Dawson’s “Anima Animus” / Marne and Imre van Opstal’s “Driftwood”

Place

Palais Garnier, Paris, France, December 1, 2025

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Dorothee Gilbert, Marc Moreau, and Guillaume Diop in Trisha Brown’s “O złożony, O composite.” Photograph by Benoite Fanton | OnP

The evening opens with “O złożony, O composite” (2004), the first work Brown created for a company other than her own, commissioned by Brigitte Lefèvre, then director of dance at the Paris Opéra Ballet. Three living monuments of the company, Aurélie Dupont, Manuel Legris and Nicolas Le Riche, travelled to New York to work directly with Brown, participating in the translation of her movement language into the classical vocabulary of the troupe. The result is a genuine fusion of the highly codified, vertically oriented Parisian étoilé style with the postmodern relaxation and distal initiation that define Brown’s choreography. For the occasion, Brown renewed her long-standing collaboration with Laurie Anderson, another revolutionary figure of the experimental New York art scene of the 1980s. Anderson created a suggestive electro-acoustic score featuring a female spoken voice reciting Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Ode to a Bird (Oda do ptaka),” together with gongs, strings, birdlike chirps and percussive drumming. The work marks a significant stage in Brown’s artistic trajectory, as she began to infuse emotional and poetic imagery into her abstract vocabulary without turning to narrative.

“Ode to a Bird,” whose opening line provides the title of the piece, enters into a vivid dialogue with the choreography: the movement recalls its evocation of the bird’s ephemeral, intricate motion. The etymological roots found in the poem, such as pta (from Polish) and pteron (from Greek), are amplified to near paroxysm in the score, becoming strikingly onomatopoeic and giving the work a resonant emotional charge. Dorothée Gilbert on pointe (also in the second cast of the 2004 production with Yann Bridard and Jérémie Bélingard), Guillaume Diop and Marc Moreau give themselves entirely to the work, offering a moving, captivating interpretation that blends robust mechanical precision with an airy, ethereal softness. The piece opens by exploring the horizontal plane, with Gilbert supported on the forearms of Diop and Moreau as she rolls forward, arms open like a bird, set against Vija Celmins’ wonderfully evocative dark, star-studded sky. Through their lifts, transitions and suspended passages, the trio excel in conveying the fusion Brown envisioned, where the elevations and rigour of classical technique meet her choreographic alphabet, characterised by fluid, grounded physicality derived from natural gesture. As a form of Ringkomposition, the piece ends as it begins, with Gilbert spiraling like a helix in her partners’ arms.

Dorothee Gilbert and Guillaume Diop in Trisha Brown’s “O złożony, O composite.” Photograph by Benoite Fanton | OnP

Trisha Brown originally choreographed the second piece of the evening, “If You Couldn’t See Me” (1994), as a solo for herself, drawing inspiration from the artist Robert Rauschenberg, known for working on the back of the canvas and exploring hidden surfaces to open new spatial dimensions. His poetics resonates clearly in this piece, for which he provides both the music and the costume, and in which the dancer, facing away throughout, offers only his back to the audience and never shows his face. What emerges is a deliberate rejection of ballet’s conventional standards and theatrical codes, grounded as they are in frontality and outward expressivity. Expression is pared down to the mechanics of the body: circular motions tracing invisible arcs across the black backdrop, shifts of direction, folds and jumps, and acute attention to the musculature and articulation of the back, shoulders and hips. The performance is given by a stunning Germain Louvet, wearing a white culotte and a light tunic open at the sides. Fluid and fully attuned to Brown’s deconstructed language, he embodies the work with remarkable naturalness. Louvet seems to discover a space of freedom, the kind one finds when dancing alone in a bedroom, unobserved and unbound.

“Anima Animus” (2018) follows as an abstract neoclassical creation by David Dawson, the first of his works to enter the company’s repertoire. The title refers to the Jungian psychological concepts of the unconscious feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) within every individual, reflecting the ballet’s exploration of contrast and equilibrium in human nature and its blending of opposing energies. It also echoes the structural oppositions present in both choreography and music, Ezio Bosso’s Violin Concerto No. 1: light and darkness, speed and stillness, soloist and ensemble. The stage picture is striking: a white trapezium set within a black frame, with costumes echoing the same palette. Hannah O’Neil erupts into a magnificent succession of jumps and airborne runs, in choreography that seems made for her. Equally remarkable is her interaction with another shining étoile, Léonore Baulac; their reciprocal, knowing glances generate a vibrant complicity. Around them, four female and four male dancers create a concentrate of class, expressivity, linearity, distilled yet energised precision and compositional clarity, as they merge and divide in small groups and execute subtle citations from the classical repertoire. Shale Wagman stands out in particular, dancing with explosive brilliance.

Eric Pinto Cata and Marion Gautier de Charnace in Marne and Imre van Opstal’s “Driftwood.” Photograph by Benoite-Fanton | OnP

“Driftwood” (2025) closes the evening as an original creation for the Paris Opéra Ballet by the Dutch sibling duo van Opstal. When the curtain rises, a group of twelve dancers in everyday clothes moves slowly, as if suspended in an aquarium. The initially enclosed scenic environment gradually expands, with shifting walls and a diorama-like structure that transforms the space into a forest. The work examines how individual identity is shaped by external forces, like driftwood carved by water, and touches on themes of belonging and community. The van Opstals’ style is highly physical, raw yet finely detailed, combining powerful kinetic energy with moments of marked emotional theatricality. This is reinforced by striking choreographic images, such as the sequence in which dancers perform handstands against a wall before collapsing one after another. The music by Amos Ben Tal and Salvador Breed is hammering, at times verging on rock, and culminates in a stylised and faintly ironic rendition of “What a Wonderful World,” danced with luminous sensitivity by Caroline Osmont and Loup Marcault-Derouard. The entire cast contributes to the work’s refinement, with especially notable performances from Éric Pinto Cata and Mickaël Lafon. Yet if the intention is to evoke the loneliness of contemporary life, what emerges above all is a pervasive gloom. This raises the question of why “intensity” so often becomes synonymous with sadness or oppression. It is also disquieting to see such gifted dancers costumed in ways that seem unnecessarily restrictive; Ida Viikinkoski, a sublime interpreter of the contemporary repertoire, appeared constrained by a close-fitting blue top rising tightly up her neck.

The contrasts on which the evening is built indeed prompt reflection. Brown’s choreography presupposes a certain familiarity with her vocabulary and its poetic abstractions, which not every viewer necessarily possesses. The bleak universe proposed by the van Opstals, meanwhile, does not easily elicit identification. The audience’s warm reception of Dawson’s work suggests a preference for pieces that allow dancers to shine while pushing them beyond their limits, and that offer clarity, beauty and a certain radiance, which is still, for many of us, what art most immediately evokes. One leaves the theatre with a renewed sense that choreography is an exacting craft, one that demands profound knowledge and carries a genuine responsibility. Indeed, unlike the great classics of the repertoire, the contrast that these contemporary works reveal is the one that can arise between stage and audience, a momentary gap in communication if the two do not meet halfway.

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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