Spectacle de l'École de Danse at Opéra national de Paris - Opéra Bastille

As an echo of the tricentenary celebrations of the French school, the Ballet School's performance this year allies tradition and modernity, giving pupils the opportunity to master works from the standard repertoire and to reach out to new worlds. Soir de fête by Léo Staats is a veritable demonstration of French choreographic style. Using extracts from the music of Léo Délibes, the ballet demands musicality, lightness in the port de bras, precise leg and foot work and some virtuoso sequences of steps. D’Ores et déjà by Béatrice Massin and Nicolas Paul, created for the school’s Tricentenary, combines the vocabulary of Baroque and contemporary dance with music by Jean-Philippe Rameau whilst Jacques Garnier’s Aunis evokes the influence of folklore on classical dance. Maurice Béjart offsets these two masculine pieces with a refined and sensual choreography for the female dancers on Chopin’s Don Giovanni Variations. Alongside this production, a series of demonstrations, presented in the form of classes, afford an appreciation of the breadth, richness and excellence of this ancestral tradition of dance training.