An American in Paris

Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a combination of exorbitant expense and a languid disdain for the little Britons with their Johnny-come-lately ballet tradition (not even one century old, let alone three and a half).

So if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, it behoves Mahomet to go to the mountain. And now is the time to do it, with the ructions brought on by the arrival last year and the departure this of Natalie Portman’s husband as ballet artistic director. Benjamin Millepied is French but spent his career as a leading dancer in New York City Ballet, whose values are broadly the antithesis of the institutionalised, hierarchical Paris Opera Ballet.

After briefly replaying the struggles with the Palais Garnier bureaucracy that Rudolf Nureyev despaired of 30 years ago, Millepied declared his resignation recently, describing some of the elegant, aloof Paris dancing as ‘wallpaper’. His vision was anti-corporate, anti-hierarchical, even anti-French — as far as many observers saw it — bringing in New York values where music and individualism count for more than the magnificently ordered classical statements that Paris Opera Ballet has its feet anchored in.

Millepied’s final new spring programme consists of four ballets brazenly from the US, by two dead grandmasters, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and two living, Alexei Ratmansky (ex-Bolshoi, now New York-based) and the much-noised young Justin Peck, whose work I hadn’t seen. All of them, to further pique interest, are ‘piano ballets’, inviting us directly to experience dialogue between dancing and music.

Unfortunately, these were the most vanishingly discreet pianists I’ve ever heard or seen. Scarlatti sonatas, Chopin mazurkas, Stravinsky and Philip Glass all murmured by in a shade of beige, as if Paris’s ballet pianists are conditioned to being doormats.