Who’s afraid of Brigitte Lefèvre? Well Eleonora Abbagnato for one! Drama at the Paris Opera Ballet

Bri­gitte Lefèvre, Dir­ector of Bal­let at the Paris Opera since 1995, will turn 68 later this year. The Paris Opera Bal­let obliges baller­inas to leave at 42 with their pen­sion; like it or not, ètoile or corps mem­ber, you’re out. Lefèvre car­ries on, even though she is past the retire­ment age for French national institutions.

Maybe con­cerned that she would stay at the helm like Alicia Alonso in Cuba, 132 of her 154 dan­cers signed a let­ter to the Min­istry of Cul­ture under­lin­ing their anxi­ety over the future of the com­pany. Although Lefèvre has, offi­cially, only two more sea­sons before she steps down, the dan­cers con­sider this too long. Maybe it has to do with her pro­gram­ming which has become increas­ingly mod­ern, yet this used to the the clas­sical com­pany par excel­lence.

Don Quix­ote and La Sylphide are the only pre-20th cen­tury bal­lets dur­ing the next sea­son. Kylián, Béjart, Petit, For­sythe, Carlson, Neumeier, Rob­bins, Brown and Cun­ning­ham make up most of the rest, though a Bal­anchine triple bill will also let the dan­cers show off their clas­sical style. The lack of tra­di­tional pro­gram­ming in this once so very tra­di­tional com­pany has been noticed. After see­ing the Paris Opera Ballet’s per­form­ances in New York, Lynn Gara­fola wrote in Dance Magazine,

Lefèvre has stocked the POB rep­er­toire with works by a host of con­tem­por­ary European cho­reo­graph­ers. True, the com­pany still dances Bal­anchine, Rob­bins, and the “clas­sics.” But if Gis­elle and Suite en Blanc are any indic­a­tion, the company’s heart lies else­where. That doesn’t bode well for POB as a clas­sical enterprise.

Though, horses for courses, Mar­garet Führer in the Huff­ing­ton Post says,

I had the oppor­tun­ity to inter­view a few of POB’s dan­cers for Pointe magazine, and they all seem intel­li­gent, soph­ist­ic­ated, and ful­filled. They may be thor­oughly clas­sical anim­als, but thanks to POB’s diverse rep­er­toire, they know what’s hap­pen­ing in the lar­ger dance world, and they’re bet­ter off for it. Onstage, wild, hungry Amer­ican bal­let dan­cers have the edge on POB’s crys­tal­line étoiles. But when it comes to pro­gram­ming, U.S. com­pan­ies have a thing or two to learn from the French.

Bri­gitte Lefèvre is nod­ding furi­ously in agreement.

So the 132 who aren’t nod­ding? Italian première dan­seuse with the com­pany, Ele­onora Abbag­nato talked to Italy’s news­pa­per Il Sole 24 Ore. After a sum­mer of tak­ing Abbag­nato e ses amis around Europe, she says she will be afraid to return to the com­pany, even though Trisha Brown will be wait­ing for her, as will Wil­liam For­sythe to put her in the Sylvie Guillem role in In the Middle Some­what Elev­ated. She says that ven­det­tas and feuds make the atmo­sphere unbreath­able in Paris. Abbag­nato has spoken in the past about the wall she has come up against under Lefèvre’s reign which blocks her out of that small ech­elon of baller­inas called ètoile, even though she con­tinu­ally dances étoile roles. There are, of course, other dan­cers who equally con­sider that they are being unjustly shunned.

Of the three names for suc­cessors that Lefèvre has put for­ward — all dan­cers — Abbag­nato favours Nich­olas Le Riche. If she’s backed the right horse she might be an étoile after all.

Share