Benjamin Millepied: ballets black swan bows out in Paris | Ballet

Posted by Martina Birk on Sunday, May 5, 2024
Benjamin Millepied with members of the Paris Opera Ballet in the Palais Garnier’s Grand Foyer, 2014. Photograph: Philippe Petit/Paris MatchBenjamin Millepied with members of the Paris Opera Ballet in the Palais Garnier’s Grand Foyer, 2014. Photograph: Philippe Petit/Paris Match
The ObserverBalletInterview

Benjamin Millepied: ballet’s black swan bows out in Paris

Last week Benjamin Millepied resigned as head of dance at the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet, criticising the company’s rigid ways. Luke Jennings, who spoke to the choreographer twice in recent weeks, reports

On Thursday afternoon, at the Palais Garnier, the home of the Paris Opera Ballet since 1875, it was announced that Benjamin Millepied had resigned as the company’s director of dance, and that he was to be replaced by Aurélie Dupont, a former company ballerina.

When Millepied was nominated for the post in 2013 by Stéphane Lissner, general director of the Opéra, the then 38-year-old choreographer and former New York City Ballet dancer came garlanded with promise. In 2010 he had choreographed and acted in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, later marrying the movie’s Oscar-winning star, Natalie Portman. In 2011, in California, he launched the LA Dance Project, a cutting-edge choreographic venture that won much critical acclaim. He was personable, newsworthy, and although a long-time artistic exile, French. Who better to lead the world’s oldest classical dance company into the future than this high-profile artist, with his beautiful young wife at his side?

The Paris Opera Ballet, founded in the 17th century, remains in many respects a court in miniature: a place of elaborate hierarchy and protocol, peopled with glacially chic ballerinas whose fashion choices are dissected in the pages of Vogue. But the company also prides itself on being prepared to make radical choices, to challenge its fashionable and demanding audience with experimental choreographers such as William Forsythe, Jérôme Bel and Wayne McGregor.

I have no power over the company’s ballet school, and I have to ask permission to promote dancers. It's very frustratingBenjamin Millepied

Millepied’s arrival was greeted with optimism. In 2014, before taking up the job, he choreographed a much-praised new version of Daphnis et Chloé on the Paris dancers. The gala opening of his first season raised over €1m, more than twice the usual amount. Lissner’s protege, it seemed, was a smart choice. And Millepied was excited to be there. “I’m so lucky to have had the experience of being both an American and a European,” he told me shortly before his resignation. “New York’s great, but there’s a different mindset in Paris. There’s a real attachment to culture – the bookstores, the cinemas – and we can put on more than 100 performances a year because the arts really matter here, and we have an audience that’s ready to see anything.”

Over the months that followed his appointment, his excitement faded. The Opéra is a byzantine organisation, notorious for its factions and backstairs intrigues. Any ballet director must be in part a Machiavelli, prepared to effect change by patient and discreet political means. But this was not Millepied’s way. Brought in as a new broom, he wished to sweep clean, and when he met resistance he made his feelings known.

Watch a clip from the Paris Opera Ballet’s Daphnis et Chloé, 2014, choreographed by Benjamin Millepied.

French by birth, but American in his cultural instincts, he voiced his frustrations at the Opéra’s conservatism through the media. In December last year, Canal+ broadcast a TV documentary, Relève, in which Millepied expressed serious doubts about the Paris Opera Ballet’s right to call itself one of the world’s great ballet companies. Understandably, not least because they were co-producers of the film, the Opéra’s management were furious, as were the dancers. Millepied followed Relève with an interview in Le Figaro, in which he likened the corps de ballet dancers in La Bayadère to figures printed on wallpaper. The reaction of Karl Paquette, a senior dancer of the company, was typical. “I was shocked by Benjamin Millepied’s disrespect for a company that he totally denigrates,” Paquette told Le Monde, adding that the past six months under Millepied had been the worst of his career.

I first met Millepied in December, before either of these media blasts had been fired. It was the first night of a triple bill at the Palais Garnier that included the premiere of a new Wayne McGregor ballet, Alea Sands. Sitting in his office, Millepied seemed detached from the excited buzz around us. He felt suffocated, he told me, by the company’s complacency, and by the many restrictions placed upon him. “I can’t hire dancers, I merely head a jury of 10 people which selects them. I have no power over the company’s ballet school, and I have to ask permission to promote dancers. It’s very frustrating, and it’s very difficult to bring talented dancers up through the ranks.”

Benjamin Millepied and Paris Opera Ballet: a step too farRead more

Part of the problem was that the company was resident at two major opera houses, the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille. “In effect there are two companies, one classical and one contemporary. This is supposed to be a ballet company, but there are dancers who can’t dance classically, who haven’t been en pointe for years. And they can’t be fired.” Of the classical dancers, Millepied continued, too many were driven by superficial perfectionism. “There’s an obsession with straight lines. Dancers performing in dead straight ranks, like soldiers. For me, that’s not ballet, and I’ve broken some of those lines up, made the work look more human, more emotional.”

Many French critics disagreed with Millepied. To replace the perfection of the Paris Opera’s corps de ballet with ragged lines, says the dance writer Laura Cappelle, “goes against everything the company has always stood for”. That said, there are aspects of the French ballet style which can grate, when compared to the more naturalistic approach of British and American dancers. “Ah yes, that famous French charm,” the former Royal Ballet star Lynn Seymour once said to me. “It does rather set your teeth on edge, doesn’t it?”

Millepied with his wife, actor Natalie Portman, whom he choreographed in Black Swan. Photograph: Samuel de Roman/Rex Shutterstock

Few would take issue with one of Millepied’s most heartfelt concerns, that of the company’s attitude to race. Its production of La Bayadère, reproduced by Rudolf Nureyev from the 19th-century St Petersburg original, contains a scene abhorrent to many contemporary eyes, in which children, listed in the programme as “négrillons” (picaninnies), are blacked up and caper around like savages. Millepied couldn’t make the company cut the scene completely, as almost all other productions elsewhere have done, but demanded an end to the blackface, and listed the children in the programme as “enfants”. In doing so, he roused the hostility not only of the Opéra establishment, but of the dancers, who objected to this rift with “authenticity” and “tradition”, despite the fact that La Bayadère has only been in the Paris repertoire since 1992.

Perhaps it’s because he’s wholly uncalibrated for compromise that there’s been such an ugly clashing of gears in Paris

Millepied was born in Bordeaux but grew up in Dakar, Senegal, and believes that ballet companies should strive to reflect the diversity of the communities in which they exist. In discussions with the dancers, however, he was stunned to be informed that black and minority ethnicity performers should not appear in classical ballet, as it was an “occidental” art form. “You can imagine how it felt being told that by dancers,” he told me. “By young people who were supposed to be artists.” Although he was the Opéra’s director of dance, Millepied was powerless to change its ethnic makeup. “The ballet is principally fed by its own school, and I have no say in the selection process.”

Millepied is not the first director to chafe against the restrictive conservatism of the Paris Opera Ballet. Rudolf Nureyev, who was dance director from 1983 to 1989, was constantly at war with the Opéra establishment, and was much criticised for his absenteeism. Millepied is possibly not guiltless in this regard. “If you want to contact Benjamin,” the dancers had taken to saying, “go on Facebook.”

Clear, Loud, Bright Forward, choreographed by Millepied with music by Nico Muhly, which premiered at the Palais Garnier in September 2015. Photograph: Ann Ray/Paris Opera

Was this damaging state of affairs predictable? Should Stéphane Lissner have courted Millepied quite so assiduously? And if, on the face of it, Millepied was the dream candidate, were there aspects of his career that should have sounded warning bells? The Black Swan affair, if a storm in a teacup, is instructive. In 2009 Millepied was a successful principal dancer and choreographer at New York City Ballet, which he joined in 1995. He lived with an up-and-coming American Ballet Theatre soloist, Isabella Boylston. All’s said to be fair in love and war, but when Millepied reportedly left Boylston for Natalie Portman, with whom he was working on Aronofsky’s film, he didn’t win any admirers in the ballet world. The ABT dancers clustered round their distressed colleague, as dancers do, and one senior company member told me that they felt Millepied had behaved “pretty brutally and unchivalrously”.

What Britain's ballet stars made of Black SwanRead more

Nor did Millepied win friends when Sarah Lane, another ABT dancer, complained that despite the fact that she had effectively been Portman’s dance double, her role had not been properly acknowledged in the credits. This was an important issue, as Portman’s Oscar was awarded, at least in part, in recognition of the fact that the actress had supposedly acquired, in just a few months, the skills necessary to display a convincing mastery of classical pointe dancing. Lane’s case seemed watertight. A clip had been posted on YouTube, showing how Portman’s face had been superimposed on hers in key dance sequences, but this clip suddenly disappeared, and the production company, backed by Millepied, insisted that almost all the dancing had been done by Portman. “Sarah Lane did the footwork, the fouettés and one diagonal [phrase],” he said. “Honestly 85% of that movie is Natalie.”

Few with any knowledge of ballet believed this, but Lane was effectively silenced. Millepied swiftly moved on from the controversy. He was a parent now; he and Portman had a son, Aleph, born in 2011. “It’s wonderful being a father,” he says. “It makes you more responsible and strong.” In 2014 he announced that he was in the process of converting to Judaism, his wife’s faith.

Millepied is a complex mixture of instinctive liberal and ruthless pragmatist. He’s charming, but he doesn’t back down from confrontation. He drives his own career hard, with one eye always on the future, yet he believes, with uncomplicated sincerity, in classical dance. “Ballet’s more than my interest, it’s my passion. Choreographing to music isn’t old-fashioned in any shape or form, and the beauty of ballet is something I love.” He argues, forcefully, for what he calls the re-intellectualisation of classical dance. “The great choreographers – Balanchine, Ashton and others – were intellectuals. But ballet has moved away from high culture, and we need to re-establish the relationship between great music and great dance. It’s about getting great conductors involved, and great writers, like those of ballet’s Romantic era, and truly reflecting society.”

Perhaps it’s because he’s an inconditionnel, wholly uncalibrated for compromise, that there’s been such an ugly clashing of gears in Paris. To succeed at the Opéra, you need silken diplomatic skills, and the ability to hold several conflicting opinions simultaneously. Millepied has neither; he is at once too much of an artist and too much of a buccaneer. But it’s been a fascinating chapter in a colourful career. We will be hearing more of Benjamin Millepied.

This article was amended on 8 Feb 2016 to correct an assertion that Millepied was absent, in California, during rehearsals for ‘La Nuit s’achève’.

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