Interview: Hugo Marchand on bringing French flair to ballet in LA

With the LA Phil ensconced at its summer home in the Hollywood Bowl, ballet takes over Disney Hall this weekend as The Music Center presents BalletNOW – Superstars of Paris for four performances featuring Étoiles and Soloists from the Paris Opera Ballet, led by Hugo Marchand.

Whether on a fashion runway, magazine photoshoot, or his main job onstage at the Paris Opera Ballet, Hugo Marchand draws attention. While his fame extends beyond ballet in France, Marchand is raising his US profile, curating this assemblage of Paris Opera Ballet dancers and selecting the mixed-bill repertoire for stops in New York and Los Angeles. 

The dancers arrived in LA this week after performing in New York’s City Center to largely rapturous reviews. The LA dance card differs somewhat from New York’s and also includes some dancers from the deep ranks of the Paris Opera Ballet. The programme is the same for all four shows, favouring solos and duets, including two Roland Petit pas de deux, George Balanchine‘s Sonatine, Hans van Manen‘s Trois Gnossiennes, and the lip-lock kiss pas de deux from Angelin Preljocaj‘s Le Parc. 

While dance, especially ballet, is usually presented in the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, for this event, Marchand and his dancers take the stage at the Music Center’s Disney Hall by architect Frank Gehry. 

Have you been in LA before?

It’s the first time. I spent my day at Santa Monica yesterday because we had a day off, so I could enjoy the beach – it was absolutely delightful. I really loved it.

You are performing in Disney Hall, which doesn’t have wings or a proscenium. How will you present ballet there?

It is true that Disney Hall is not a theatre that is usually used for dance. It is usually for big musical concerts and a symphony orchestra. But I like to perform in venues that are a bit different because it attracts another kind of audience. The Disney Hall stage is being adapted for this programme – they have worked on the stage, so we have new wings. Also, they put in a dance floor, so that we don’t get injured jumping on the stage, and additional work on the lighting, which is very specific. It is all very interesting. Also, for us, it is a challenge not to be all the time in theatres that are very comfortable and made for dancing.

Have you been on the Disney Hall stage yet?

Yes. We have been working since this morning in the studio rehearsing and also on the stage.  I have been very excited to discover this incredible venue. I mean, the architecture is just crazy. It’s beautiful. It is also part of the atmosphere of the show. When you get to discover incredible places like this Disney Concert Hall, then when you enter inside, you are already excited and happy to discover the programme. That’s something that is also part of the show. We’ve been able to practice a little bit to find the different… how can I say…?  To feel the atmosphere of the theatre and to feel how it’s going to be with the audience inside. It’s going to be a different adventure for us.

You performed last week at New York’s City Center which is a more traditional proscenium theatre, and the programme was somewhat different from here.

City Center is a theatre made for dance, where everything is about ballet or about contemporary dance or about musicals. Disney Hall is very different, so it’s a new adventure for us. The programme is different from New York because in New York we had the Bejart Ballet Company, and they didn’t come with us to LA, but we have four more dancers from the Paris Opera that joined us yesterday. Two arrived from Shanghai because they were performing in China before, and two from Paris. We have eight dancers plus a cellist and a pianist.

The programme is going to be classical, neoclassical, and a bit contemporary as well, presenting a very diverse range of choreographers, going from George Balanchine to Roland Petit to Carolyn Carlson to Jean-Guillaume Bart. It’s interesting that we have another programme to show to the American audience. Having these two different programmes in two big, incredible cities like New York and LA is a chance for us to show the diversity of repertoire that we can do and not only do the same thing all the time.

Did you invite these dancers based on the choreography you wanted to show, or did you pick the choreography because you wanted these dancers to be part of this programme?

I actually did both because I really like to work with my friends. All the dancers on stage are my friends because I love to have this adventure and share it with people I love. It’s also part of the pleasure that we can take from performing, but also of the nice atmosphere that we can create on stage.

When people love each other on stage, that is also shown to the audience, and they get to understand the different relationships that we are having, and I think that really improves the quality of the dancing on stage. But there are also some pieces that I really wanted to have because I find them very singular and very strong and not very known in the US.

And which ones are those?

Well, for instance, the Roland Petit ballets – the pas de deux from Le Rendez-vous and the pas de deux from Carmen are not known well in the US. I find it interesting because I guess everyone has seen the Lady Gaga performance for the Olympic Games when she opened the Olympic Games doing Mon truc en plumes (My Thing with Feathers). That was actually a cabaret piece that was created by Roland Petit for his wife Zizi Jeanmaire, and she became world-famous doing this solo in Europe and also in the US. But now everybody has forgotten about it, and everybody thinks that Lady Gaga created it, but it was made by Roland Petit. So, we are bringing back Roland Petit in the US with two of his ballets.

What are the other works that you particularly wanted to include?

Well, the pas de deux by Carolyn Carlson. L’Esprit du Bleu from her Signes is very important because Carolyn is an American. She was born in California. She studied dance in America, but she left and has been living in France since the 70s. She is an incredible choreographer. Nobody knows her in the US, but she has been working with the French, Italian, Spanish, and all the European dancers for years. She creates poetry with the body, and so I’m very happy to show her work here to an audience that shares the same nationality, but who don’t know her at all.

The Paris Opera Ballet is one of the singular, distinctive, top-of-their-game ballet companies, yet in the US, we don’t see French ballet dancers that much. There was a performance with the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022, but that was pretty short.  For Americans who missed the Hollywood Bowl visit and haven’t made it to Paris to see you, how would you describe what is distinctive about the Paris Opera ballet? What is the signature of the Paris Opera at the Etoile level?

I think the signature is the elegance. We don’t want to show off. We don’t want to be only entertainers. We want to offer an experience. We want to help people to reflect on what they are seeing, but we want to do it in a sober way.

We are not there to be completely explosive dancers, throwing ourselves in the air or on the floor like crazy persons. We try to bring poetry. We try to bring elegance. We try to bring sensitive works that will help people get in touch with their own feelings, with their own insights, their own inner worlds. That is something that I really find important. It is not about the dancers on stage. It is really about the people in the audience, how they can see the works on stage, think about their own life, and think about their own experiences, about their own feelings and emotions.

When the audience comes to see a ballet performance, they don’t come to see dancers; they come to see themselves through the dancers, and that is something I really want the people to discover with the programme that we’re going to show, because it’s an emotional journey. It’s not only just changing your mind and feeling better after the show. It’s really something about trying to get more in touch with your own feelings and your own intimacy; that is something that I hope people will feel, and they will leave the theatre with joy, but also new thoughts in their minds, and maybe that will help them to reflect on their lives and on their emotions.

Is that something you’ve always thought, or has it evolved as you’ve danced and your career developed?

I have always felt it deep down, but now I can use the words to say it. So now I can express this with words and talk about it, but before I was just feeling it in my guts, and now I can say it out loud to find a way to express it.

It sounds like that perspective is very freeing.

Yes, because the dance experience should be something that is healing, that is giving care to people. It is not just a random performance, like a TV show or something, that you just see and then you just move on to something else. I hope this programme is bringing joy, depth, but also insightful meanings, things that you can really connect to your intimacy.

The dancers appearing with Hugo Marchand are Hannah O’Neill, Germaine Louvet, Leonore Baulac, Dorothee Gilbert, Antonio Conforti, Marc Moreau, and Litizia Golloni.

Announced repertoire and dancers: 
Delibes Suite (Golloni & Conforti), Dying Swan (Gilbert), A Corps Ouvert (Marchand), Carmen pas de deux (O’Neill & Conforti), Le Parc pas de deux (Gilbert & Marchand), Sonatine (Louvet & Baulac), Les Rendez-Vous (Gilbert & Moreau), Trois Gnoissiennes (Marchand & Baulac), L’Esprit du Bleu from Signes (O’Neill & Louvet), Adage en Blanc (Moreau & Galloni).

BalletNOW–Superstars of Paris at The Music Center, Disney Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., Downtown LA
Fri., July 31, 7:30 pm, Sat., Aug. 1, 7:30 pm, Sat.-Sun., Aug. 1-2, 2 pm
$36-$163
BalletNOW: Superstars of Paris.

Ann Haskins Guest Author

Ann Haskins has written about dance and theatre for L.A. Weekly since shortly after it began publishing in 1978. She has also written about local and national dance for Pointe Magazine, Dance Spirit Magazine, Dance Teacher Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, L.A. View, Coast Magazine, the Daily News, and the Herald Examiner.

Among her broadcast projects, Ann hosted Inside Theater on KCRW-FM and contributed dance and theater features to both KLON-FM and KUSC-FM. She has twice received Horton Awards from the Los Angeles Dance Resource Center for her coverage of dance in Los Angeles and received the Los Angeles Dance Festival award for Raising the Visibility of Dance.