INQUIRY – Ballet delegates have proposed wiping this highlight of a dancer’s career off the map, as it is performed nowhere else but in the Paris company. A step that has long been contested.
Grumbling and shooting in the Paris Opera Ballet. At issue was the abolition of the internal promotion competition for ballet dancers, this annual event where every dancer in the company wishing to advance to the next grade in the corps de ballet hierarchy performs a classical compulsory variation and a variation of their choice. The key to promotion is higher pay and access to solo roles only, starting with the premier danseur class. Ballet representatives went to management to demand that the competition be scrapped altogether.
It’s very fashionable to call everything into question. The demand isn’t coming from the youngsters who are still on fire, but from those who have been banging their heads against the company’s walls for some time. In the same vein, some dancers refused to take part in the latest corps de ballet fashion show on the grounds that it was backward, martial and too hierarchical. Or that a few steps on…
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