Cantilevered at an improbable angle, a dancer revolved around a pole onstage at the Folies Bergère. Other dancers wandered languorously past, feathered and sequined, stockinged and suspendered, high-heeled and hatted.
The dancers resembled the performers at Paris’s famous music halls — not just the Folies Bergère, but also the Crazy Horse and the Moulin Rouge — immortalized in posters and paintings of scantily clad, long-legged women doing the cancan.
But this was a different kind of cabaret; a contemporary story set in a dystopian world in which sexually ambiguous characters are perhaps fantastical imaginings.
As Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz played, the dancers whipped each other in a mock-sexual frenzy, and then collapsed on the final notes.
“Yes,” said the choreographer Benjamin Millepied to a few spectators. “There is a giant orgasm in ‘The Blue Danube.’”
It was late October and the first day that Millepied, his dancers, musicians and technical team were onstage, running through “Move Me Once More,” a cabaret work that Millepied described as “a theater piece with dance and songs.”
This is a departure for Millepied, a former director of the Paris Opera Ballet, who has created numerous ballets for companies worldwide as well as works for his contemporary dance troupe, the L.A. Dance Project.
Along with his recent creations, “Summerland” and “Barbara Du bout des lèvres,” “Move Me Once More” is part of an ambitious three-week run (Nov. 9 through Nov. 29) at the Folies Bergère, where a kind of controlled chaos reigned as acoustics were tested, lighting effects explored and exits and entrances plotted.
The theater, which opened in 1869 and was refurbished with Art Deco detail in 1926, no longer produces the titillating showgirl revues of its heyday. Instead, it programs musicals, comedies and live music shows. It’s not an obvious spot for a contemporary choreographer or for the kind of lengthy, mixed-repertory season that usually is the province of ballet companies.
But Millepied — never afraid of a bold idea — said he had always loved the Folies Bergère. “Loïe Fuller performed here, Josephine Baker danced here, Barbara sang here,” he said in an interview in the red plush-and-gold auditorium after the rehearsal. “There is so much history. It’s so alive and it’s a place to do something for a broader public.”
Millepied added that he’d been fascinated by cabaret in his childhood in Bordeaux. “The sense of spectacle and light in ‘A Chorus Line,’ Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret,’ were so extravagant, so vivid,” he said.
Frédéric Jerôme, the director of the Folies Bergère, said that he “wouldn’t necessarily have thought of a dance season” at the theater, he said, speaking in French in a telephone interview. But he saw it as an opportunity. “The DNA here is the revue,” he said, “and those were multidisciplinary, with dance, music, theater. I could see why it attracted him.”
Millepied said the idea for a cabaret piece first germinated when he made a dance for the Crazy Horse soon after moving, in 2022, to Paris from Los Angeles (where he founded the L.A. Dance Project).
“As a choreographer you want your dancers to bloom as human beings, to express who they are, and in cabaret you have that, but with the volume turned up,” he said.
But he didn’t want to create a show that “was just a series of numbers,” he added. “I wanted to use that world to tell a story.”
Millepied enlisted Léa Mysius, a film director and screenwriter. Together they developed the story of a central figure, River (played by the actress Laïka Blanc Francard), who appears to be imprisoned and interrogated, at which point she reveals a love story with an androgynous free spirit, Ange (Eliot Preti), a target in their authoritarian world.
“Benjamin gave me about 15 songs that he wanted in the show, and he had choreographed a lot already, so the writing really came out of the dance,” Mysius said during a rehearsal break. “It’s about a love for someone nonbinary, and of course it’s a political statement, but I don’t want to hit anyone over the head with that. I want people to feel the story viscerally.”
Millepied said that the music — including “Mr. Sandman,” Sade’s “Jezebel,” Radiohead’s “Creep” and Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” — is “the playlist of the protagonist’s love story, and all songs I love.”
Millepied has also incorporated a master of ceremonies (Charly Voodoo), roller skaters and pole dance. “Benjamin enjoys having vastly different people in the space and a mix of artistry,” said Courtney Conovan, who trained for a year to perform an aerial, acrobatic solo on the pole. “He used the pole with freedom and new ways that I wouldn’t have imagined.”
“Move Me Once More” is the latest and most experimental of three new works set to vocal music that Millepied has created over the past year. The balletic “Du bout des lèvres” is set to the songs of the French chanteuse, Barbara, an idea first suggested to him some 20 years ago by Mikhail Baryshnikov, a close friend of the singer.
“For French people it’s the soundtrack of your life, and I have always loved the music,” Millepied said. “But I lacked the maturity then — the text has such poetry; you can’t do it if you don’t understand yourself.”
The former Paris Opera Ballet étoile, Florence Clerc, 75, plays a central figure in the piece. “The songs are a woman’s story,” Millepied said, “a woman telling of love and joy and living passionately.”
“Summerland,” named after a town near Santa Barbara, Calif., has a more recent provenance, inspired by the music of the French singer November Ultra. “Her music took me to that California idea about the beauty of nature and light, a sort of promised land,” Millepied said.
Ultra, who performs in “Summerland,” said that the experience had been magical. “I find I sing differently every night,” she said. “I am singing for them, they are dancing for me, and that creates a third space I had never experienced before.” She added that “as a fat person, there is always the question of how much space I can take.” Millepied made sure “what I would dance would be me,” she said. “I have learned to find joy in movement.”
The Folies season is likely to be a one-off, Millepied said. “This is a moment in my life where these three ideas were incredibly powerful, and I had the inspiration and excitement to do it all at once.” All the works are “about living life to its fullest,” he said. “It’s a moment of celebrating art and life and loving dance. I wanted to give that to an audience.”
The post At the Folies Bergère, Life Is a Cabaret (With Serious Dance) appeared first on New York Times.
