fri 29/03/2024

Master of French Ballet Chic Roland Petit Dies | reviews, news & interviews

Master of French Ballet Chic Roland Petit Dies

Master of French Ballet Chic Roland Petit Dies

Creator of outrageously sexy ballets dies a week before London fêtes him

Roland Petit died this morning aged 87, a world choreographer of chic and erotic theatricality who blew away the French classical ideal in a roar of post-war sexual liberation. He created an all-male corps of swans for Swan Lake long before Matthew Bourne, and his roles for his exquisite wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, repositioned ballet drama upon the femme fatale rather than the virgin. Arguably, though, for British ballet-goers he was above all the seducer who almost lured Margot Fonteyn away to France (and who got her to have a nose job) just as she was leading the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to international glory. Had Fonteyn done so, the history of Britain’s ballet would have been different.

His death in Geneva, reported by his widow and their daughter Valentine Petit, has occurred only a week before English National Ballet is due to dance a tribute bill of his work in London, including two of his most celebrated works, Carmen and Le jeune homme et la mort.

London was a crucial city for Petit: Carmen had its world premiere there in 1949, not long after the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (soon to be the Royal Ballet) unveiled their first full-length Sleeping Beauty with Fonteyn at Covent Garden. Petit’s lusty work caused consternation in London - one commentator said you could hear the men's trouser buttons popping during the performance. The young English choreographer Frederick Ashton feared he had become out-of-date overnight, while the public was torn between the attractions of classical ballet and contemporary chic just when Sadler’s Wells needed to build an audience.

Petit told Fonteyn’s biographer that he had maintained both Fonteyn and Zizi Jeanmaire as simultaneous lovers, one for tenderness, the other for sexual passion. However, it was the sexual passion that he married, wedding Jeanmaire in 1954, and staying married to her until his death 57 years later. This was something of a reflection of Petit’s effect on the image of ballet women at the time.

Watch Petit and Jeanmaire dance a duet from Carmen

Ballerina roles had for more than a century been largely made on pale romantically suffering virgins or royal princesses; Petit’s women were liberated and exciting, modern and tangibly real - and yet archaic femmes fatales. Probably his most popular ballet worldwide is Le jeune homme et la mort, in which a young bloke lazing around in his room is visited by an enigmatic, seductive female - at the end of which brief encounter he hangs himself.

jeune_homme_rpetit_POB The young man’s role was seized upon by the great ballet stars of the next decades, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov notable among them (pictured, Paris Opera Ballet's Jérémie Bélingard, © Anne Deniau/POB). As with Carmen, the role of La Mort, the death goddess, has been sought out by a pantheon of great ballerinas, in Paris, Russia and the US as well as in Europe. However, his way with the corps de ballet let him down - it was like salad dribbled around the meat, said one French ballerina.

Women were always attracted to Petit’s dark Italianate good looks like moths to a flame, and when Petit and Jeanmaire, after their marriage, toured the Ballets de Paris to Hollywood, his charm conquered Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth, among others. To Jeanmaire’s chagrin, he chose a younger lookalike, Leslie Caron, for his Fred Astaire musical, Daddy Long Legs.

However, for Jeanmaire he created many spectacular dance revue shows featuring Zizi’s vibrant personality and opulent trappings, which became an enduring cultural image of Sixties Paris. His busy television and Hollywood career, and his identification with young, sexy and theatrical, tended to brand Petit as a showman rather than as a major ballet choreographer as far as the conservative Paris and London establishments were concerned.

Petit was the child of an Italian mother, who started up the famous Repetto shoe shop in 1947, and a Parisian bistro owner, who strongly encouraged Roland in what would become a remarkable career in ballet. The lad joined the wartime Paris Opera Ballet aged 16, rapidly became a sought-after soloist, and by 20 had already decided to strike out on his own in the new post-war France. He founded the Ballets des Champs-Elysées as a modern young rival to the monumental Paris Opera Ballet, and made a swift impact as a choreographer with sexually explicit and contemporary ballets around brilliant but unorthodox dance stars, such as Jean Babilée and Renée (later Zizi) Jeanmaire.

Petit lived long enough to find himself brought at last into the fold of the legendary

He returned briefly to Paris Opera Ballet as balletmaster in 1970 but essentially Petit was an independent of huge charisma and creative ego, and he was much happier directing the Casino de Paris from 1970 to 1975 - which he bought in order to showcase Jeanmaire - and then as director-choreographer of the Ballet de Marseille from 1972 to 1998. In Marseille he created a constant flow of new work, not always as substantial as they were stylish, and attracted a crowd of visiting ballerinas, Altynai Asylmuratova, Viviana Durante and Tamara Rojo among them. He staged his most famous earlier works around the world right into his eighties, including at the Bolshoi, the Kirov, American Ballet Theatre, Paris Opera Ballet and the Tokyo Ballet.

Petit_Paradise_Lost_Font__NurAlas, not here however. His relationship with London after that first iconoclastic Carmen did not flourish as he had hoped. The Sadler’s Wells (later Royal) Ballet asked him to create a work the following year, Ballabile, but while dancers thought he'd been something of a sadist in rehearsal, the ballet itself was found tame.

He later created an erotic pop-art Paradise Lost in 1967 for Fonteyn and Nureyev (pictured right). But he never made a toehold in Britain - like the other leading French choreographer, Maurice Béjart, his contemporary, he was eclipsed by the rise of Kenneth MacMillan, whose ballets were as powerful in character but stronger in classical virtues.

Petit lived long enough to find himself brought at last into the fold of the legendary by his original company, Paris Opera Ballet, which in recent years staged many of his ballets, and the English National Ballet’s Coliseum season from 21 to 24 July will offer new British generations the chance to assess three of his most lionised works: Carmen, Le jeune homme et la mort (The Young Man and Death), and L’Arlèsienne (The Girl from Arles).

Watch ENB's trailer about Roland Petit


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