Dancer Pierre Lacotte dies at 91

This is the second big loss of the French ballet. Less than two months ago, Mikael Dinard, an etiquette of the Paris Opera and the most charismatic dancer, also very beloved by Russians, passed away. World fame came to them at the same time, after the film-ballet “La Sylphide” filmed by Pierre Lacotte for French television in 1971. Lacotte restored this masterpiece of the Romantic era, and his wife Ghylaine Tesmar and Mikael Dinard performed the main roles in it.

Pierre Lacotte is best known in the world as a restorer of lost ballets. His interest in ancient ballets manifested itself from childhood, when he attended the lessons of Madame Egorova, the prima of the Mariinsky Theater in Paris, who showed her students old variations. He studied at the ballet school at the Paris Opera with French teachers Gustave Rico and Carlotta Zambelli. But the lessons of the famous Russian ballerinas Matilda Kshesinskaya, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Lyubov Yegorova were recommended by Serge Lifar, the former premier of the Diaghilev ballets, and then the premier and ruler of the Paris Opera ballet, an unquestioned authority. And then all the future geniuses of French ballet, the creators of avant-garde and revolutionary ballets – Roland Petit, Maurice Bejart – passed through these Russian classes. Lacotte did not arrange any revolutions in ballet. He was interested in antiquity.

Upon graduation in 1946, the 14-year-old teenager was accepted into the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera. But six years later, in 1951, at the age of 19, he was elevated to the rank of the first dancer. Like Roland Petit and his friend Jean Babilé, a career as a classical premier at the Paris Opera did not appeal to Lacotte. The post-war era was seething with experiments, and already in 1957 he danced at the Metropolitan Opera (USA), in theaters in Germany, Switzerland, and the Benelux countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was the artistic director of the Eiffel Tower Ballet troupe at the Champs-Elysees Theatre, for which he staged the performances Concertino to the music of A. Vivaldi and The Parisian Boy, which is noteworthy to the music of Charles, then fashionable in Paris Aznavour, as well as “Night the Magician” (music by S. Bechet), “Solstice” (music by D. Weinberg), etc. In 1963-1968 he was the artistic director of the troupe “National Ballet of the French Musical Youth”. It was there that he met the dancer Ghylen Tesmar, who later became his wife. For this troupe, Lacotte staged 35 ballets, including The Voice, again in collaboration with the super popular Edith Piaf. So the choreographer has never shied away from modernity. Later, since 1985, for five years Lacotte headed the Ballet de Monte-Carlo, and in the 1990s he was the artistic director of the Ballet Lorraine in Nancy. And in this capacity, he comes with a tour of his troupe to Russia.

Lacotte never broke with the Paris Opera, collaborating with her as a choreographer. In Paris in May 1961, on a tour of the Kirov Theater, he met the then unknown dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Interest in the ballets of the Diaghilev entreprise brought young people together, and Lacotte enthusiastically showed Nureyev the steps of Nijinsky from the ballet “Vision of the Rose”. Nijinsky then raved about both. Lacotte even somehow becomes involved in the famous Nureyev escape at Le Bourget airport, which the Paris press immediately dubbed “the jump to freedom.” At least he appears in the published KGB documents related to this case. Although Lacotte himself denied his involvement in the escape all his life and believed that Nureyev then made a spontaneous, unorganized, emotional decision.

And Nureyev was friends with Lacotte all his life. In 1981, he will restore for him the old ballet Marco Spada by Joseph Mazilier, which Nureyev will dance with his wife Lacotte Ghislen Tesmar, first at the Rome Opera, and four years later, being already the head of the Paris Opera, he will transfer him to this abode of classical dance. Many years later, in 2013, in memory of his friend, Lacotte will also stage Marco Spada at the Bolshoi Theatre.

This passion of his for the old ballets of the era of romanticism did not fade away all his life. Since 1968, he began to systematically research archives, collect historical records. He also worked with the famous archive of Marius Petipa’s assistant Nikolai Sergeev at Harvard University.

– I began to study all available materials, turned to the Louvre, where in 1939 the grandson of Maria Taglioni transferred the archive of his grandmother. Because of the outbreak of the war, it was placed in the basement and stored there next to other unsorted archives. For a month, every evening, together with one of the employees of the Louvre, I searched the dungeons of the museum for the ballerina’s archive. Once, when my assistant was ready to stop searching, I asked him to remove another box from the top. It was Taglioni’s archive. It contained her personal belongings and papers,” Pierre Lacotte told the story of the creation of his version of the La Sylphide ballet, which made him famous all over the world.

The Frenchman, carried away by the search, did not stop there.

– I made a list of theaters where Maria danced “La Sylphide”, and started looking there. The Paris Opera Museum has preserved a score with a description of all the scenes. There was a lack of Taglioni’s appearance in the second act, and I came up with my own version. Later, when I brought La Sylphide, performed by the Paris Opera, to St. Petersburg, the director of the theater museum invited me to get acquainted with their materials on La Sylphide. They opened the dossier, which preserved the description of Taglioni’s exit in the second act: it turned out to be exactly the way I created it.

Lacotte was also helped by articles by English critics who wrote about Taglioni as the Sylph.

“They knew ballet very well and explained and described ballet steps in detail. In a private collection, I found drawings depicting many of the dances of the second act: exits, lines of the corps de ballet. It was as if I were putting together a puzzle: here one piece fits into another, but here something is missing. Naturally, all the pieces could not be found. The recording of the dance class that Maria received from her father helped me to recreate the missing fragments. There were descriptions of exercises, typical movements and combinations.

It was then that the inquisitive researcher remembered the lessons of Madame Yegorova. After all, she, in turn, studied with Christian Ioganson, Taglioni’s last St. Petersburg partner.

“Ioganson showed his students how Taglioni danced, and Egorova passed it on to us,” Lacotte said.

So, having discovered the archive of Maria Taglioni and the score with a description of all the scenes in the Louvre vaults, also relying on reviews, testimonies of contemporaries, drawings and engravings, in 1971 Lacotte shot for French television that very famous ballet film, which became so popular that through for a year he was transferred to the stage of the Paris Opera, where they invited the artists who danced in this film – Ghyslaine Tesmar, who soon became the wife of Lacotte and, which is absolutely incredible, the étoile of the Paris Opera, and Mikael Denard.

Of course, the choreographer could not restore the romantic masterpiece exactly, but he very successfully recreated the spirit of the old production. With the help of the method he invented for restoring old ballets, which can be called “fantasy”, because, relying on his own deep knowledge of the disappeared ballet, reviews, memoirs of contemporaries, images on engravings and paintings, the choreographer actually fantasizes how he could look like – he restored such ballets as “La Sylphide”, “Butterfly”, “Natalie, or the Swiss Milkmaid”, “Maid of the Danube”, “Shadow”. As well as “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” by Marius Petipa, “Marco Spada” and “Paquita” by Joseph Mazilier and many others. In 2001, Lacotte also reconstructed the ballet Coppelia (choreography by Arthur Saint-Leon), in which he personally played the role of Coppelius.

Lacotte embodied on the stage the spirit, not the “letter” of the old ballets. And he could have neglected the authentic records of the Harvard archive. It is said that Lacotte rejected the “pair of rivers” transcribed from Harvard notes and shown to him when he restored “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” at the Bolshoi, stating that such primitive dances were not suitable for his ballet. At the same time (as it became clear quite recently, when The Pharaoh’s Daughter, created already from the records from the Harvard archive, appeared on the stage of the Mariinsky Theater), he correctly guessed, of course, greatly modernizing the style of this ballet by Marius Petipa.

All the luxury of decoration, all that ancient Egyptian entourage, which at the Bolshoi Theater for his “Daughter” was carefully reproduced according to the sketches of Lacotte himself, serves here only as a frame for showing dances staged by the choreographer in abundance and with great imagination. Staged on the basis of the well-known Lacotte of the old French school, recalling the classical pas of the century before last and saturating the choreography with intricate fine technique and drifts, the choreographer at the same time added elements for the Bolshoi Theater inherent in the Russian and Soviet schools (for example, upper supports, and in addition double assemblies and, of course, fuete). Why the delightful and virtuoso French trifle only sparkled with new colors.

In general, Lacotte was one of the first Western choreographers to work in the Soviet Union. In 1981, especially for Ekaterina Maksimova and the Theater of Classical Ballet N. Kasatkina and V. Vasilyov, he restored and showed in the Kremlin Palace the old ballet Filippo Taglioni “Natalie, or the Swiss Milkmaid”. Two years earlier, in 1979, at the Kirov (Mariinsky) Theatre, he performed An Evening of Ancient Choreography with the famous Kachucha by Fanny Elsler from the ballet Lame Demon by C. Gide (choreography by F. Elsler after J. Coralli); a little later, he transfers the pas de sis from the ballet Les Cuisines (choreography by Arthur Saint-Leon), fragments from the ballets The Lame Demon and The Butterfly; and in 2006, commissioned by the Mariinsky Theater, he staged Jules Perrot’s famous ballet Ondine in St. Petersburg.

Lacotte is as modern as ever: tickets for his “Sylphide” in “Stasik” and “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” in the Bolshoi are sold out at lightning speed. Doomed to popularity and his ballet “Marco Spada”. Lacotte turned out to be a true friend of the Bolshoi Theater and, under difficult modern circumstances, did not interfere with the resumption of this performance.