Paris Opera Junior Ballet at the RBO Next Generation Festival
Paris Opera Junior Ballet, only founded last year, are dancing at the Royal Ballet & Opera House…
Paris Opera Junior Ballet in Maurice Béjart’s ‘Cantate 51’. © Julien Benhamou
Paris Opera Junior Ballet
2025 Next Generation Festival bill: Cantate 51, Requiem for a Rose, Mi Favourita and (not reviewed) Allegro Brillante
★★★✰✰
London, ROH Linbury Theatre
19 June 2025
www.operadeparis.fr
www.rbo.org.uk
Part of the 2025 Next Generation Festival
Annoyingly, a South West Trains breakdown robbed me of seeing Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante, and I was not really compensated by a stationary view of a Staines railway embankment for 40 minutes. I have always loved Marina Harss‘s brief summation:’Allegro feels like all the fast sections of Sleeping Beauty piled into one 13-minute ballet.’ Judged by the screen relay of the entire stage, it looked well enough done, but really, I can’t say anything substantive about a performance I didn’t properly see. Certainly, it would have been nice to hear Tchaikovsky’s briskly cantering Piano Concerto No. 3, because a hallmark of the night was good music in each of the four works.
For 17-23 year olds, the 18-strong Paris Opera Junior Ballet was only formed last year, and while open to students from around the world, the majority of dancers come from Paris Opera’s own school. Regardless of background, they all have the unmistakable épaulement of the main company — necks seem longer, heads held higher particularly. This is a rigorous old-school look, as you might expect from the world’s oldest ballet company. It’s a good look.
Allegro aside, the Junior Company brought three works that are probably new to most in this country — certainly all new to me. And as I say, all to interesting music too, though sadly not played live. The big find of the night was Maurice Béjart’s Cantate 51, set to a Bach cantata for solo soprano and trumpet (BWV 51, Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen — ‘Praise God in all lands’). The music is celebratory and uplifting — appropriate to Bach’s inspiration of the Annunciation. The ballet dates to 1966 and is relatively early in Béjart’s choreographic career — certainly before he became the contemporary megastar creator so popular in Europe at the end of the last century. It’s a work that fascinatingly veers from Balanchine’s happier neoclassicism to a strange duet section almost like Balanchine’s Agon, with various charged manipulations and displays between him and her. Put like that, it rather sounds like a homage to Balanchine, but Cantate 51 is way more than that as it joyfully plays with the academic and loose, with lots of original movement, including some delightful little shuffles, bends, squats, sits and hops. Gorgeous arms too, so often held aloft. Béjart celebrates the beauty of the body as much as anything and here is a link to his own company dancing it.
Led out by Angélique Brosse and Jaime Almaraz, it asks a lot in leisurely and spine-tinglingly precise duets, with stately circling solos interspersed with devilishly difficult jumps and slow turns. Almaraz was nearly the equal of it, just occasionally ragged, but Brosse was particularly impressive, always maintaining a cool perfection. 20 minutes long, eventually the stage fills with seven dancers in sparkling movement as the Bach reaches its own effervescent conclusion. My goodness, Cantate 51 should be much more widely known.
Annabelle López Ochoa’s Requiem for a Rose also comes in at 20 minutes, and I can’t help but note how great choreographers really manage to be satisfyingly short and succinct in making their points. Requiem for a Rose is about love and is danced to ‘…the most romantic music I know’ — Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major. Ochoa is at pains to make a distinction between the constancy of love and the froth of romance and uses a red rose as a prop/motif. It was originally created for Pennsylvania Ballet in 2009 and they have a fine video where Ochoa explains what the piece is about; I think the Linbury Next Generation Festival programme notes (and web) could helpfully have included more about the work’s context.
Requiem for a Rose starts to the sound of a heartbeat, with Shani Obadia in a rather fidgety and slow contemporary solo of yearning and searching, a red rose forever held in her mouth. Morphing to the Schubert, the stage floods with dancers in identical full red skirts (Tatyana van Walsum) that move beautifully, particularly in turns — this is pretty and romantic movement that spins off into beguiling duets and quartets. But the group also keeps coming together as a bouquet that surrounds Obadia. Will the love she seeks be realised in the endless swirl of romance? Well, perhaps not this time, as Obadia closes out the ballet to the sound of her lonely heartbeat once again.
Unfortunately, the evening closes out with something of a dud — Mi Favorita by José Martinez. There are more unhelpful web and programme notes that just say the work is a homage to the pioneers of ballet and quote a long list of the great and the good of (mainly classical) ballet choreographers. To some rousing Donizetti (from the opera La Favorite), this piece certainly galops along and shows some reverence to the ballet pioneers, but there is also some humour — quite slapstick at times and other times rather subtle. The problem is we don’t really know what Mi Favorita is — is this a comedic piece looking for lots of laughs, or has the odd laugh been injected and we are there for thrilling movement? It didn’t seem to work as either. If you want to have fun at ballet’s expense, then the TROCKS, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, are the company that know how to do this, and best you have a word with their director, Tory Dobrin. Favorita was Martinez’s first work (back in 2002), and here it just felt a bit embarrassing as young dancers manfully tried to deliver on comedy that seasoned performers would find difficult. Only the classical costumes of Agnès Letestu, a great Paris dancer who retired 12 years ago, came out of it well.
José Martinez, dance director of Paris Opera Ballet since 2022, can be well satisfied with his creation of the Junior Company and the standard they hold. That’s the big achievement. And with the first three works, he pulled together the basis of a fine night — just a shame he couldn’t resist the urge to bring back a piece of his own.