Review of ballets by Marion Motan and Xie Xin at Opera Garnier

The Paris Opera Ballet opened the 2023/24 season with an all-female “troika” composed of two world premieres – “Last Call” by the Frenchwoman Marion Motan and “Horizon” by the Chinese Xie Xin – and Crystal Pite’s bestseller The Season’s Canon. Tells Maria Sidelnikova.

The Motan/Signe/Pite evening is the last echo of Aurélie Dupont’s reign at the Paris Opera. She sought to discover new names of choreographers, but it is unlikely that the productions of her nominees – Ivan Perez, Alan Lucien Owen, Bobbie Jen Smith and Or Schreiber – will return to the Opera stage. Especially under Jose Martinez, whose thoughts are on modern pointe choreography. The debut of Marion Motan and Xie Xin also did not create a sensation, but of all DuPont’s experiments this program looks the most complete.

42-year-old Frenchwoman Marion Motan broke with the ballet world as a child, exchanging the barre at the Paris Conservatory for street hip-hop. After a brief collaboration with Angelin Preljocaj, the determined girl rushed across the ocean to conquer American concert stages: first as a backup dancer, then she became a stage director for Madonna. At home, she strengthened her status as a “choreographer of the stars”: she choreographed for the videos of Stromae, Christine and the Queens, taught dance to Juliette Binoche, Demi Moore and motley people in the revue Freak show by Jean Paul Gaultier. Now she has fifteen artists of the Paris Opera at her disposal.

In Last Call, Marion Motan explores the theme of death. The performance has a biographical background: on the evening of March 30, 2022, her father called her to say goodbye. On the stage, immersed in darkness, interrupted by flashes of neon lamps, there is a telephone booth – the only decoration of the performance. The phone rings twice – at the beginning and at the end of the performance. The only Living person who answers the call is the “luminary” Alexander Boccara, indispensable in modern productions, where soloists usually never set foot. Stunned by the news, the already short dancer shrinks, becoming even smaller, and, as if in slow motion, picturesquely writhes in horror, stretching a telephone wire across the entire stage. The infernal atmosphere thickens, an army of people in latex emerges from the darkness. At the head of this grotesque crowd is the black Death (Alex Ibo – a charismatic, ardent “plot”, invisible in the classics and bright in the modern repertoire), taking the Living One on a strange spiritualistic journey in the spirit of David Lynch.

Motan places confidently and linearly. It turns out to be something like four videos for a variety of loud music, written by composer Mika Luna especially for “Last Call”. The first part is blues: in clouds of cigarette smoke, swaying their hips, Death and his minions seduce the Living. The second is aggressively driven: here the entire movement arsenal of wrestling is used – from boxing hooks to the cartoonish head-banging of someone else’s knee. The third is jazzy, fiery, wild dances a la Josephine Baker. The finale is ritual: in the center of the stage, the Living is stretched out in the arms of Death, as if posing for a “pieta”; the crowd, swaying their hips and sending waves of arms, escorts them to other worlds. Motan did not give the main characters original choreography. Her specialty is group performance of simple but very energetic dances. The Parisian ballet people love this – it’s their chance to feel like pop stars. “Plot” Caroline Osmont is one of the best performers of the modern repertoire, and two young promising “quadrille” players, Enzo Sogard and Corentan de Neyer, especially distinguished themselves.

Choreographer Xie Xin is the first Chinese woman in the history of the Paris Opera. Chinese modern dance is unfamiliar to France, so Xin acted as its ambassador. Her career as a dancer, choreographer and, finally, the head of her own troupe, Xiexin Dance Company, developed in China. The only European trace was her work with Sidi Labrie Cherkaoui, who, according to her, greatly influenced her choreographic language. “Horizon,” with music by Sylvian Wang, is the complete opposite of “Last Call.” Nothing ostentatious, deliberate, or frontal—all poetry and metaphysics. The movement flows and spreads like stage smoke flooding the stage, in which the nine corps de ballet dancers, dressed in airy-foggy transparent costumes, are drowning. Neither the faces nor their capabilities can be discerned here: the bodies melt in a continuous, conflict-free flow of dance, breaking into duets and trios and reassembling into a single body. In this hypnotic emptiness, if you wish, you can discern an analogy with the paintings of lyrical abstractionists or fantasize about the boundaries of the physical, the ephemeral nature of beauty, the cyclical nature of life, human duality and other intangible categories. But this exercise is too intimate for the audience of two thousand, which blissfully fell into a collective slumber at the premiere.

Only Crystal Pite managed to wake him up, whose 2016 ballet The Season’s Canon to the music of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons adapted by Max Richter triumphantly returned to the stage of the Paris Opera (see Kommersant on September 30, 2016). Everything that the two debutantes tried to formulate – both the group as an integral body, and the combination of the physical and spiritual, and the opposition of figurativeness and abstraction – Pite put into a perfect stage form. It is interesting to observe how the sound of the choreography changes with new inputs – this is also a sure sign of an ageless performance. As soon as we replaced the pathetic, statuesque Marie-Agnès Gilot with the selfless little Eleanor Guerino, Paite’s favorite theme of ecology, which is directly or indirectly present in all her ballets, sounded even more alarming. “It’s terribly beautiful,” my neighbor commented. You can’t say more precisely.