“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.