Gala des écoles de danse du xxie siècle at Opéra National De Paris - Palais Garnier

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Paris Opera Ballet School’s annual performances. They enable the young artists to discover the major works of the repertoire and receive an introduction to the great masters of music. Divertimento n°5, a construction of pure dance, alternates solos, ensembles and pas de deux in a skilful and elegant vocabulary. William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, revisits academic tradition by accelerating movement and pushing virtuosity to its limits. Raymonda, Rudolf Nureyev’s artistic manifesto, was the first work he produced for the Paris Opera Ballet as the House’s Director of Dance. He used it as a means to introduce a new generation of dancers. Today, those dancers are teachers at the Ballet School and it is now their mission to pass on those roles to the students. The production focuses on classical technique and its different interpretations – a technique taught since time immemorial and which the public can discover on the occasion of the annual Demonstrations. As a follow-up to the Tricentennial celebrations, the Ballet School is organising another “Gala des Écoles” (Schools’ Gala) enabling students from different institutions to work together along with a number of events, lectures, and masterclasses organised around the performance.