“Find an elasticity, keep morphing,” Hofesh Shechter called out. “Then sharp and together!”
Four Paris Opera Ballet dancers, all women, were doing slow moonwalks in a rehearsal studio, sinuously undulating their upper bodies, their faces impassive. Three men joined the group, circling their hips, tilting their heads back in trancelike counterpoint, all to a quiet, mesmeric beat.
“Feel elegant and also groovy,” Shechter told them. “Don’t lose the detail in the movement; never think because you are part of a group it doesn’t matter.”
It was a September afternoon in a studio at the Opera Bastille in Paris, and Shechter, an Israeli-born, London-based choreographer, was rehearsing “Red Carpet,” the full-length work he created for the Paris Opera Ballet at the Palais Garnier there in June. Set to a pulsing, percussive score — also by Shechter — with showy, glamorous costumes by Chanel, it is full of his characteristic expressionist movement, evoking at once folk dance, tribal ritual and ravers at a club in ecstatic abandon.
This may not be what first comes to mind when contemplating the Paris Opera Ballet, that august institution founded by Louis XIV in 1669, famed for the precision and beauty of its classical dancing.
Nonetheless, “Red Carpet” is the dance that Paris Opera Ballet is bringing on its first company tour to the United States since 2012, with stops at Cal Performances in Berkeley (Oct. 2-4) and New York City Center (Oct. 9-12).
“We are showing a side of the company that thrives in Paris, where they are known for contemporary repertory and living choreographers,” said Stanford Makishi, the artistic director for dance at City Center. “That’s not really their identity in the U.S., so we are showing the other side; it’s not just about white tights, tutus and tiaras.”
It was also a practical decision, said José Martinez, the company’s director. The Paris Opera Ballet gives around 180 performances a year at two theaters — the gilded neo-Classical Palais Garnier and the clinically modern Opera Bastille — with little time for touring. “Red Carpet,” with 13 dancers and four musicians, was a portable and practical option at the beginning of a new season, when the company would be performing both “Giselle” and a triple bill at home.
Martinez added that he and Makishi were putting plans in place for regular visits from the Paris Opera Ballet in the coming years. “The idea is to show our range over the next few years, from contemporary to classical,” he said.
It was under the long tenure of Brigitte Lefèvre, who ran the Paris Opera Ballet from 1995 to 2014, that contemporary dance became a significant part of the company’s repertory and identity. While most major ballet companies commission work from contemporary dance choreographers, Lefèvre — a former Paris Opera dancer who left to form her own contemporary ballet troupe — made these commissions a core component of the repertory, inviting choreographers like Trisha Brown, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Jérôme Bel to create pieces for the Opera.
After Benjamin Millepied’s brief, more ballet-focused run as company director, from 2014 to 2016, Aurélie Dupont continued in Lefèvre’s footsteps, programming Shechter, Sharon Eyal, Alexander Ekman, Bobbi Jene Smith and choreographers with commercial dance backgrounds, like Marion Motin and Mehdi Kerkouche.
Over time, an unofficial company-within-a-company has formed of dancers who consistently perform contemporary work.
These dancers have mostly made up the cast for Shechter’s works at the Opera; in addition to “Red Carpet,” the company performed his “The Art of Not Looking Back” in 2018, and the double bill of “Uprising” and “In Your Rooms” in 2022.
“Every time I dance his work I have the impression I am living more fully,” said the Paris Opera Ballet dancer Marion Gautier de Charnacé, who added that she rarely performed in classical pieces. “You have to be incredibly precise and also let go; it’s a way of discovering the intelligence of your body.”
The title was Shechter’s starting point. “I was thinking about glamour,” he said, “about pop culture around us where you must show yourself at your most imagistically beautiful, about MTV and celebrities. And art is about showing your most vulnerable self.” He was also, he said, thinking about the Palais Garnier, “glamorous in a different way, with its layers of royalty and tradition.”
Contemplating all this, he said, he asked himself: “What am I doing at a place like the Opera? Are we really trying to spill our guts onstage, or is it all a manifestation of skill and power? The dancers know the system, the hierarchies, the history. I thought ‘Red Carpet’ could manifest these things.”
The piece opens to the strains of Middle Eastern song and heavy red velvet curtains parting slowly to reveal a tightly bunched group of dancers beneath a huge chandelier, an echo of the monumental one hanging over the audience at the Palais Garnier. The dancers are immediately in motion with whole-body intense energy, arms lashing the air, backs curving and legs kicking out in formations that coalesce and dissolve with startling rapidity. The lighting is smoky and penumbrous, gradually brightening to reveal the four musicians seated above the dancers, who occasionally dance at their feet, like rapturous fans at a rave.
The scene evokes a rock concert or a cabaret show, the hypnotized immersion of dancers at a party, jazz clubs in dark basements.
In rehearsal, the amount of skill and precision demanded from the dancers was clear. Antoine Kirscher, the only principal dancer in the piece, said, “You have to really bend, to morph from one movement to another with no stability in the torso and a pull downward, an earthiness that’s not in ballet.”
Most importantly, he added: “You have to let the movement evolve in your body, let go of the notion of improvement and doing something ‘well.’ It’s just you, being as honest as possible in the movement, and that’s it.”
“Red Carpet,” Ariane Bavelier wrote in a review in Le Figaro, paints a portrait of the Opera with its evocation of the dancers as a kind of tribe “subjugated to the repertory, to the uniform lines of the corps de ballet, to solitude in spite of being an ensemble, to the fear of the challenges that face them.”
Dancing in the piece, Kirscher said, “You are inhabiting the bizarre, the ugly, the groovy, the psychological trip; you are part of a tribe, but your individuality emerges.”
Shechter, who began his dance career with Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, moved out of dance for a while to play drums in a rock band, and he has always composed for his dances. (He has also choreographed for the theater, notably “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway in 2015, and a recent “Oedipus” in London.) He said that music composition and choreography happen simultaneously for him, and that one process feeds the other.
“It’s all very sketchy to start, and I open it up in the studio,” he said. “I start with the direction of energy I want to explore and try to push in as extreme a way as I can with the dancers. I make a lot of music and try it out. The more adventurous and shameless you are, the more you can come to a vulnerable place in the beginning of a process, the better it is.”
He added, “You have to ask, did we try something new, did we open some boxes, or did we just do what we are good at?”
David Binder, the director of the Powerhouse International Festival, where the Hofesh Shechter Company will perform “Theater of Dreams” in November, said in a phone interview that he had long admired Shechter’s work for its theatricality and passion. “It’s wildly contemporary and he has an ability to create images that stay with you long afterward, and to capture emotions in a way only dance can,” he said.
One of those memorable images comes toward the end of “Red Carpet,” as the dancers strip away their glittering robes and tuxedos, and in flesh-colored body tights move slowly, searchingly, under the imposing chandelier; a small vulnerable group on the big stage, reduced to essentials: the body, each other.
Was Shechter thinking of war, of refugees, of hostages, of Israel and Gaza? “Not consciously,” he said, adding that while creating “Theater of Dreams,” he had a constant mantra in his head: “I will not make a piece about the war.”
He thought about it. “It’s like I take your hand and you are going to come for a walk in the woods with me,” he said. “I might have created the trip, but you’ll have your own feelings as you see the views.”
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