The great choreographer of the 20th century Roland Petit turned 100 years old

“Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Prévert, Boris Vian, Jean Genet, Georges Simenon, Yves Saint Laurent, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov wrote scripts for my ballets, painted scenery, costumes and curtains. In such an environment, my artists and I began our journey in this world. For several years, Hollywood became my refuge: Howard Hughes, Samuel Goldwyn, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Danny Kaye, Marlene Dietrich and even Marilyn Monroe. All the stars of my generation met me, and most importantly, Mademoiselle Jeanmaire, with whom we never parted… I can tell you stories about Nureyev and Chaplin, about the greatest of the greats, about all the artists with whom fate brought me together,” recalled the French classic about his life.

Diamond Eater Zizi Jeanmer

Undoubtedly, the main person in the life of Roland Petit was Zizi Jeanmaire – his wife and muse, who inspired the choreographer throughout his long life. “Zizi is my Carmen, my diamond eater! My locomotive, to which I attach more and more new carriages in the form of my productions,” Jeanmer Petit spoke about Zizi, listing the roles in the ballets (“Carmen”, “The Diamond Eater”) that he did for her. The best of them, who made her name as a ballerina, was Carmen. It was for this party that he would come up with her world-famous haircut.

They met at school at the Paris Opera, together they entered the famous troupe, from which, having failed to advance to the next step in the Opera hierarchy, she soon left. And in 1949, Petit created Carmen for her, which would become a real revolution in the art of choreography. José Petit will dance the part himself.

To be precise, the ballet was created for a completely different ballerina, but suddenly the persistent Zizi, then Rene Jeanmaire (a pseudonym in Hollywood would be invented for her by Samuel Goldwyn), also laid claim to this role. In order to get rid of the obsessive beauty with a beautiful thick head of curly hair, because of which Jeanmaire has a lot of admirers, Roland sets conditions that seem impossible to fulfill…

“I had something in mind and Zizi had to listen to me. Cut off the lush head of curly bucollets that gave her a resemblance to Louis XIV, comb her hair like a boy, and apply pomade to her hair. Apply white makeup to your face, like Pierrot in pantomime, and finally get rid of the emphasized femininity in your movements. The next day, frenzied photo reporters took possession of Zizi’s new look, replicating her face on the front pages in millions of copies,” recalled Roland Petit. Like a real actress, she was not afraid to lose her luxurious hair for the sake of the role; she agreed to everything without complaint and even happily. And a few days later the premiere took place at the Princess Theater in London…

A hurricane and a storm of applause shook the theater that evening, but in the finale Zizi’s strength left him. “My gaze blurs, my shoulders drop, and I hear, as in a nightmare, a weak voice: “I can’t take it anymore, I’m about to faint.” Impossible! She must hold out until the end. And then, I don’t know how it happens, I slap her in the face. Half a second is taken aback, her temperament takes over, she literally rushes at me screaming: “You bastard!” – and this is no longer a pas de deux, but a fight to the last, in which two opponents fought: an angry tigress who received a slap in the face, and me, desperately happy that I managed to revive the action until the death of Carmen. The curtain finally falls in the deep silence that precedes triumph. The next day, newspapers not only in London, but also in Paris, Berlin, and New York talk about the event. Everywhere there are photographs of Zizi and her Don José, illuminated by inspiration. From the very morning, an endless queue encircles the theater building, and spectators leaving after the evening performance have to make their way to their cars through a crowd of ticket-hungry people who, from ten in the evening, took their places at the doors of the theater with luggage – folding chairs and thermoses, so that the next day when the box office opens first”…

Then there were quarrels, reconciliations, departure to Hollywood, return to Paris… A wedding in 1954… A daughter, Valentina, who was born soon… Performances at the Casino de Paris, which Petit headed for five years for the sake of his wife, rejecting offers to direct the Paris Opera ballet.

in the 70s, vocal and dance shows created for his wife by Roland Petit were all over Paris… His best revue, called “Zizi, I love you” (essentially a public declaration of love) often began with a replica of an airplane that hovered above the stage , and half-naked girls wrapped in boas, made up to look like Zizi, descended from the ladder. Then there was a tense pause and she was the last to appear. It’s hard to describe what started in the hall…

“Then for me, the absolute symbol of Paris was not even the Eiffel Tower, but Zizi Jeanmaire,” writes Azary Plisetsky, who knew Jeanmaire well, and the brother of Maya Plisetskaya, in his recently published memoirs “Life in Ballet.”

“People flocked to the Casino de Paris to watch Zizi dance, sing and recite in incredible costumes designed by Yves Saint Laurent. She performed one of her numbers, “Mon Truc en Plumes,” or “The Little Thing with Feathers,” countless times. I remember very well the delight with which the audience greeted the very first chords of the song of the same name, performed by Zizi, surrounded by men with huge “dancing” fans made of ostrich feathers,” Azary Plisetsky describes one of Roland Petit’s Parisian shows.

“Notre Dame” breaks a hole in the Grand Opera

Despite his love for the sparkling “light” genre, the fate of this choreographer turned out to be inextricably linked with the citadel of classical ballet, the Paris Opera, whose ballet troupe he was repeatedly offered to lead. For six months he even led the illustrious team, but resigned after learning that the management was hostile to the reforms he proposed.

When he was 9 years old, of his own free will, he entered the school at this theater. And this was back in 1933. At 16, he was accepted into the corps de ballet and was soon promoted to solo roles by the then artistic director Serge Lifar, who specially staged his ballets on Petit. Despite this, at the age of 20, the ballet rebel left the legendary troupe. And soon he created, probably, his most famous ballet “Young Man and Death” – an 18-minute masterpiece for two dancers. The ballet was staged by a very young Petit back in 1946, when Boris Kokhno, Diaghilev’s former personal secretary, and Jean Cocteau, also Diaghilev’s comrade-in-arms, a famous poet, director and artist, wanted to glorify their favorite – Petit’s classmate at the Paris Opera school, 22-year-old Jean Babile. Create for him something like “The Phantom of the Rose” – Nijinsky’s legendary role, but in a new way.

Cocteau composed a plot for Petit, who came to him with a request, in a few minutes, just after leaving the bathroom. On the day of the premiere, Cocteau replaced the jazz melodies from the then fashionable American song “Frankie and Johnny,” to which the ballet was rehearsed, with Bach’s “Passacaglia.” Babile and Petit woke up famous the next morning. The philosophy of existentialism was in great fashion at that time. The “borderline situation,” the problem of choosing life or death after the war, has interested many intellectuals. And it was a ballet about the Phantom of Death. The young man is waiting for his beloved, and meets a seductive beauty, who turns out to be Death.

Then there were “Girls of the Night”, “Carmen”, “Diamond Eater”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, “Wolf” and his other equally original choreographic works. And only two decades after his departure, in 1965, Petit appeared at the Paris Opera again. This time as a world-famous choreographer to stage his ballet “Notre Dame de Paris”. Having staged a total of 11 ballets in the citadel of classical dance, Petit created his main works for the National Ballet of Marseille, whose troupe he headed for more than 25 years.

“Cathedral” not only made a hole through which modern French choreography poured onto the stage of the Paris Opera, the ballet shocked the imagination of Russian audiences during the historical tour of the main French troupe in 1970. Staged eight years later on the stage of the Mariinsky (at that time Kirov) Theater, the ballet masterpiece turned out to be the first production of Western choreography in Russia.

Blood connection with Russian ballet

But before staging “Notre Dame de Paris” in Leningrad, Petit appeared in Moscow to stage his next masterpiece on Maya Plisetskaya – the ballet “The Death of the Rose.” “Roland dressed up in all white from head to toe for the historical moment. Smells like perfume. He came to Moscow—it was cool autumn—dressed in a long-skirted raccoon fur coat. Muscovites have never seen such a French monsieur. Since the War of 1812!.. Rumors immediately spread through the theater that Petit had come to rehearse with me, but his appearance was so outlandish that theater onlookers kept sticking their long noses into the doors of the rehearsal hall. When will you ever see something like this…” – this is how Maya Plisetskaya describes his acquaintance with the Bolshoi Theater in her memoirs.

“The Death of the Rose” was the second part of the ballet “The Garden of Love”. Petit chose his famous dancer Rudi Brians as a partner for this pas de deux and flew with him to Moscow for the “bride.” The contrast with the fragile Plisetskaya, dressed in a “pink petal” (a chiton made by Yves Saint Laurent) with Rudy Brians, was striking. The dancer seemed to “drain” Maya on stage with his muscular embrace.

The famous choreographer staged the duet in one breath, in a few days. “The choreography was done well, we only changed a few lifts that didn’t suit my body. Roland rehearses with me himself. Not trusting the tutor. He shows the movements thoroughly, in full force. Hanging in Briansa’s arms. Tears your legs. I’m not used to working with such frenzy. Roland is angry:

– Are you so lazy with me – or always?

– The main thing for me is to remember the text, then I’ll add more.

“It’s a strange Russian school,” Roland sums up.

– What’s strange about that? I want to dance until I’m a hundred years old.

– What if you’re not lazy?

– You won’t last more than forty…

But I infected Roland with my laziness. When we later did a ballet based on Proust, he told me several times:

– Improvise, just improvise…

– But in what way?

“As the Russian school tells you”…

The famous French choreographer had a connection with the Russian ballet, one might say, a blood connection. As a boy, he went to private studios for lessons, where Russian ballerinas Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Lyubov Egorova, and Madame Ruzan taught. With Diaghilev’s secretary Boris Kokhno created one of his first troupes. And the ballet god Vaslav Nijinsky wrote to him after seeing his ballet “Carmen” in London: “I will try to come again and then I hope to meet you. I am delighted with the talents you have collected in your troupe.”

Petit loved working with Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Ekaterina Maksimova and Vladimir Vasiliev danced in his “Blue Angel”. Alla Mikhalchenko and Irek Mukhamedov presented to the Bolshoi audience his early ballet “Cyrano de Bergerac”, which, in turn, became one of the first Western premieres on the playbill of the country’s main theater.

In the 2000s, his ballets “The Queen of Spades”, for which the choreographer was the first among foreign choreographers to receive the State Prize, “Passacaglia”, and “The Cathedral of Our Lady of Prizh”, were performed with great success at the Bolshoi. In the tenth years – “Young Man and Death”, “Arlesienne”.

At the Mariinsky, in addition to the ballet “Young Man and Death,” his “Carmen” enjoyed great success. At the Musical Theater named after. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko “Coppelia”. Roland Petit’s people in this production look like dolls, and the dolls are copies of people. But there is an abundance of charm and cabaret charm. Refined classics have always coexisted calmly in his productions with the techniques of variety shows and music hall, and “Coppelia” is another confirmation of this – the dancers here use twist movements, and the cancan brings the fun to the boiling point. Like his other productions, Petit’s incredibly funny version is made with true French chic and intoxicates with charm, like the glass of champagne that Professor Coppelius presents to the doll he designed in the ballet. It was this eccentric romantic that the brilliant French choreographer made the most important character of his performance. Petit even added his own features to his image and loved to perform the part he created for himself until his old age.

The last time the maestro appeared in Moscow was in 2010. No one could have thought that this was goodbye. Petit loudly admired his new favorite Ivan Vasiliev, for whom he transferred his iconic ballet “Young Man and Death” to the Bolshoi, ran out like a boy to bow, joked, and amazed him with his cheerfulness and energy. Although, as it turned out, he was seriously ill, had poor orientation and was losing his memory.

A year later he was gone. The great choreographer of the 20th century Roland Petit died on July 10, 2011 in Geneva at the age of 87.