The Salon des Boiseries, in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris, occupies a wing of the Palais du Louvre which formerly contained grace-and-favor apartments for lesser members of the nobility. The room is now dedicated to the display of fine woodwork from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including an enormous picture frame intricately carved with climbing vines and swirling crests, and topped with a crown of laurels. It’s fit for a full-length portrait of a king, yet it frames only blank space, as if it were a perplexing, and possibly fraudulent, piece of contemporary art.
The frame served as a backdrop one morning in May for a press conference held by Van Cleef & Arpels, the jewelry company. It was a gray morning with pelting rain, the kind of weather that encourages reporters to skip a press conference. But the room was filled to capacity with the city’s fashion press corps, mostly young women in neat dark dresses and belted raincoats. They had come to see the latest creations of Van Cleef & Arpels, but they had also come to see Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer, whose newest work the company was sponsoring.
A few months earlier, Millepied, who is thirty-six, had been named the incoming director of the Paris Opera Ballet. As a result, the presentation of his new ballet, “Reflections,” later that week at the Théâtre du Châtelet, was of special interest. The piece, to be performed by his own small company, the L.A. Dance Project, offered the first indication of what Millepied—who was born in Bordeaux but has lived in America for the past twenty years—might have in store for Paris.
Millepied, who wore an open-necked white shirt, jeans, and a blue blazer by Rag & Bone, radiates an impervious confidence, as if he were shellacked with it. His dark hair was almost as closely cropped as his artful scruff of beard. He is lean and chiselled, though not quite as lean and chiselled as he looked at the peak of his career at New York City Ballet, a decade ago. At the time, he was known to aficionados for his high, joyful jumps. But beyond the sphere of balletomanes Millepied is best known for choreographing the dances in “Black Swan,” the point-shoe thriller from 2010, which starred Natalie Portman. He also appeared briefly onscreen, as a dancer, and during the production he and Portman became involved. His character’s assertion that he didn’t want to sleep with Portman’s character was raunchily alluded to by a visibly pregnant Portman in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes that season. Millepied and Portman married a year ago; their son, Aleph, is two.
Although Millepied does not have the popular recognition of Mikhail Baryshnikov—or of Rudolf Nureyev, who directed the Paris Opera Ballet for six tumultuous years, in the eighties—he is, thanks to “Black Swan,” classical ballet’s most prominent ambassador, in an era when the art has a diminishing public profile. (Profitable post-Portman productions of “Swan Lake” have been alleviating the deficits of ballet companies nationwide.) In France, where he has been the face of Homme Libre, a fragrance by Yves Saint Laurent, and has made a television commercial for Air France equating a ballerina’s flight with that of a 747, Millepied is a celebrity; the French are particularly amused by how fitting his name is to his profession. And so when he was offered the Paris position by Stéphane Lissner—currently the chief of La Scala, and the incoming director of the Paris Opera—the choice seemed influenced not just by artistic factors but also by a desire for the publicity that Millepied would generate.
The Paris Opera is one of the most venerable cultural institutions in France, a country not deficient in venerable cultural institutions. It was founded as the Royal Academy of Music, in 1669, during the reign of Louis XIV, in whose court the steps of classical ballet were first codified. (In Paris, the city’s ballet company is part of the city’s opera company; this arrangement differs from the one in New York, where the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet are separate institutions.) Millepied’s appointment surprised just about everyone in the world of dance, and especially members of the company, who had long expected a new director to come from within their ranks.
In the Salon des Boiseries, Millepied explained that “Reflections” was a descendant of George Balanchine’s landmark work “Jewels” (1967), the first full-length ballet without a story. In particular, Millepied had been inspired by “Rubies,” Balanchine’s second movement—not by its steps (though he had danced it many times) but by its mood and its score, by Stravinsky. “For me, ‘Rubies’ has this more sensual aspect, with more tension, and a score close to jazz, which represents an American, New York energy—an almost crazy speed in the steps,” he said, in French. “Reflections” drew on his own American experience. He had enlisted as collaborators David Lang, the New York composer, who had written a score of dissonant minimalism, and Barbara Kruger, the artist based in Los Angeles and New York, who had created a set emblazoned with her signature white-on-red text. Millepied declared that “Rubies” was jouissif—orgasmic—to perform.
He told the crowd that Balanchine was the choreographer for whom he had left France as a teen-ager: first, to enroll at the School of American Ballet, in New York, and then to dance at New York City Ballet, the company that Balanchine founded, in 1948. “There was a relation to music that was appealing to me,” he said. “There was a real energy, a joy.” Millepied spoke of the advantages that his bi-continental life had given him, marrying French cultural tradition with American innovation. “I really feel like somebody who benefitted from all these different cultures,” he said. “It’s a whole, and it’s part of that whole to come back to France.”
A few months earlier, I spent several days with Millepied in Los Angeles, where his company was rehearsing “Reflections.” Its studio is downtown, in a former bank near the Museum of Contemporary Art. One afternoon, he worked with Morgan Lugo, a fine-featured dancer who bears a passing resemblance to Millepied as a younger man, and Julia Eichten, who has a soulful bearing and a mass of hair that would have delighted Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Lugo and Eichten were rehearsing the opening movement, a slow, romantic duet that suggested desire spent and rekindled: post-jouissance. There were moments of intense tenderness, as when Eichten placed her hands on his waist and Lugo maneuvered his upper body within the circle formed by her arms, so that his head rested on her shoulder and then rolled down the length of her arm—the lover as exhausted child. And there were moments of display, as when Lugo separated from Eichten, and extended into a showy arabesque while Eichten stood watching. “Should I look at her?” Lugo asked. “Yes, I would dance for her,” Millepied said. “Stay connected.”
Millepied occasionally stepped into Lugo’s place, marking the steps in his sneakers, to indicate tone and tempo. Often, he wanted the movements to seem like those of ordinary people in intimate encounters. He stopped the dancers when he wanted to alter a gesture. “That looks a little bit false—it’s my fault,” Millepied said, as Lugo lifted Eichten at the waist, so that she rose with her ankles flexed and feet still, as though she were a doll. “You should do something with your legs,” Millepied said. The next time that Lugo lifted her, Eichten gently stepped in space, as if she were so transported by the relationship that she couldn’t tell whether she was grounded or floating; Millepied nodded approvingly.
“It’s very much the tradition where I come from,” Millepied told me later. “The steps sometimes could look quite conventional, if they are not understood well. But if you really pay attention to the right detail there are ways to make something conventional very beautiful.”
Millepied is only a few years removed from the gruelling routine of the ballet dancer, and his interactions with the company members were big-brotherly, bearing no resemblance to those of the imperious ballet master in “Black Swan.” He charmed with self-deprecation: after entering the studio in a hurry one afternoon, he squirted Purell from a dispenser and dabbed it under his arms. “This is how French people shower,” he said.
Deciding that Eichten and Lugo’s duet was working well, Millepied turned to another slow duet, between Nathan Makolandra, a young dancer with a hawkish face and preternaturally flexible hips, and Amanda Wells, a dancer of cool elegance. Whereas Eichten and Lugo’s duet had suggested an equivalence of power and strength, with each dancer taking a turn to lead the other, this movement was more classical, with Makolandra supporting Wells in a lift, or dipping her to the floor. Yet Makolandra and Wells were not convincing as a romantic couple: they did not look as if they entirely trusted each other, and seemed to be holding themselves apart even as their bodies came together.
At one point, Wells was seated on the ground, almost supine, and Makolandra began to raise her by entwining his left arm with her right, and putting his right hand around the back of her neck. Millepied stopped the music. “You can’t have a man grabbing a woman by the neck,” he told Makolandra, firmly. “The way you touch, the way you move, the way that you are partnered, the way that she gets to be on her own—all these things read for something.” The next time through the passage, Makolandra placed his arm under Wells’s torso.
Later, privately, Millepied reflected on the incident. “I like to let the women be in charge a lot in my duets, because there is something really old-fashioned about the man carrying the woman across the stage, and it’s not how I want to portray women,” he said. Yet the dancers’ personalities inevitably shaped the work, too. “It was interesting, because in a way that’s how Nathan relates to women,” he told me. “It’s not conscious. It’s how he relates to others—he could have done that to a guy, too. That was a gesture that I wouldn’t be capable of doing.”
Millepied first came to America in 1993, when he and another student at the Lyons Conservatory attended a summer program at the School of American Ballet. “The cab dropped us off at Lincoln Center, and it felt as if only dancers were walking across the plaza—girls with bunheads, and everything,” he says. “That night, we were very jet-lagged, but it was the closing night of the New York City Ballet season, and we went to see ‘Symphony in C’ and ‘Jeu de Cartes,’ two ballets that I ended up dancing with the company.” For Millepied, it was a revelation. “I had never seen ballets with that kind of energy, that kind of response to music.”
Millepied’s mother taught modern and African dance; he spent the first four years of his life in Dakar. His father, a coach to national athletic teams, enlisted his son to demonstrate high-jump technique to his students. Benjamin learned modern dance first, then started classical ballet at the age of eleven, in Bordeaux. By the time he was thirteen, he had left home to study in Lyons. Dimitri Chamblas, a dancer and a co-founder of the L.A. Dance Project, was Millepied’s roommate; they often broke out of their room after lights-out, sometimes sneaking into performances at the conservatory’s concert hall while still wearing their pajamas, then departing before the house lights came on. “He was working all the time, but he was also playing,” Chamblas says. “He went into the studio to practice, but he was also doing percussion, he was playing piano, he was trying to make really amazing and difficult movements, he was watching videos of dancers to get inspiration. When you are thirteen, you do what your teacher tells you to do. He did that, but he also had an open-minded conception of dance when he was so young.”
The conventional course for a French dancer would be to apply to the École de Danse, at the Paris Opera Ballet. “There was a documentary on the school, and there were all these boys in gray tights, and curfews, and teachers with canes and stuff, and there was no way I was going there,” Millepied said. The film that did inspire him was “White Nights,” in which Baryshnikov starred as a Russian dancer who flees the Soviet Union for the freedom of the U.S.
A year after attending summer school in New York, he enrolled full-time at the School of American Ballet. By then, Balanchine had been dead for a decade, but Jerome Robbins was still working. In 1994, Robbins set a ballet, “Two- and Three-Part Inventions,” for students at the school, including Millepied. Robbins told a friend, Aidan Mooney, about the rehearsals: “He said, ‘There is a kid who gets things that no one else gets—he can shade things.’ ” Millepied recalls, “You prepared yourself when you rehearsed with Jerry. You warmed up for two hours. You walked into the studio with this hyper-attention.” Robbins, who had worked with Lee Strasberg, often conjured sensual scenarios—like feeling the sun, or painting the sky—to help dancers anchor themselves emotionally in a ballet. “When you work with that kind of genius, it’s rare—you realize it when you lose it—someone who really takes you places with very few words,” Millepied told me.
Robbins took on Millepied as a protégé outside the studio, too. “Robbins basically said to me when I was sixteen, ‘You have to see a lot,’ ” Millepied recalls. Robbins took him to the ballet and to Debussy’s opera, “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Robbins encouraged friends like Mooney to take Millepied to plays and museums; for several years, Millepied lived upstairs from Mooney’s apartment, on St. Marks Place. “I liked learning, and I often had people that were older in my life,” Millepied says. “I was super, super hungry.”
As a choreographer, Millepied owes a clear debt to Robbins: as in Robbins’s work, his dancers often seem to ignore the audience, and to adopt a heightened version of everyday movement. But as a dancer Millepied was precise and classical: “More Apollo than Dionysus—in a way, very French,” Jennifer Homans, the dance critic, says. He joined the company proper in 1995, and was promoted to soloist three years later. “He had such amazing jumps,” Ashley Bouder, who joined the corps in 2000, recalls. “We all had crushes on him, watching him with our mouths open.” A documentary, “Bringing Balanchine Back,” about New York City Ballet’s visit to St. Petersburg in 2003, shows Millepied vaulting across the stage in Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” then telling an interviewer that he was inspired by the spirit of Nijinsky. Millepied recalls, “For me, that was like the Olympics. That was the peak of my technique.”
In New York City Ballet’s library, he studied videos of the dancers he most admired: Helgi Tomasson, who retired in 1985, and Ib Andersen, who retired in 1990. “They were both really poetical and classical—really elegant and refined,” he says. “I admired the care of the steps, not being flashy. I looked up to these guys who had a sort of selfless, very beautiful way of engaging.”
In 2002, he was named principal dancer. He was particularly noted for his partnering: the way a male dancer holds and supports a female dancer, lifting her just before she jumps so that her ascent seems effortless. Janie Taylor, who often danced with Millepied, says of him, “I always felt really comfortable and well taken care of. For some guys, it is a really natural thing, and for other guys they have to learn it.” If Millepied brought to his dancing an intuitive understanding of women, he says that performing Balanchine’s pas de deux had a reciprocal influence on the way he perceived women. “Balanchine had his own obsession with women—how he presented them, the aspect of chivalry,” Millepied says. “Learning how to do those duets affected me in a big way. When you are dancing these pas de deux over and over again, it has some impact. You pay attention to how a woman moves. You watch her, very carefully.”
The episodes onstage that Millepied recalls most vividly are not lifts or leaps but moments of stillness. A favorite role was Oberon, in Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “There is a moment before the scherzo, one of the finest classical solos, and you stand onstage in the darkness, and that moment of silence was so thrilling. I could see the audience—they were lit, like moonlight was on them. You are playing a king, and you feel like a king.”
Despite these triumphs, Millepied grew restless. After being promoted to principal dancer, he went to Peter Martins, the company director, and told him that he wanted to choreograph, for the company and elsewhere. “He said, ‘Peter, I have too many ideas,’ ” Martins told me. Millepied founded his own small company, Danses Concertantes. It performed in Europe, and in the Hamptons, where Millepied encountered wealthy art lovers who became donors, including members of the Arpels family. Martins was not surprised by his success: “He’s very smart, and he’s very charming.”
Meanwhile, Millepied choreographed for other companies. In 2006, he made “Amoveo,” a work set to music by Philip Glass, for the Paris Opera Ballet. Glass proposed to Millepied that Nico Muhly, then a young composer working for Glass, go to Paris to conduct the piece. “Benjamin listens to music for pleasure actively, not just as background music,” Muhly says. “It was never just ‘I like this, and I want to dance to it.’ He was engaging with it in a less practical-minded way, and more in the head.” As a result, Muhly says, Millepied is able to navigate an orchestral score with an unusual degree of sophistication: “He appreciates what it is doing structurally, and he appreciates bigger shapes, and he appreciates them coming back, and he appreciates technical stuff.” His latest collaboration with Millepied will have its première at New York City Ballet’s annual gala, in September.
Millepied’s peripatetic career as a choreographer took a toll on his dancing, as did several foot injuries, and he performed less and less at New York City Ballet, even while he remained, nominally, a principal dancer. “We couldn’t figure out if he lived in New York or L.A. or Paris,” Ashley Bouder says. He retired, in 2011, without the farewell appearance that principal dancers usually make, accompanied by bouquets and ovations. “My interest was over,” he says. “I had learned all that I had to learn there, and it wasn’t for me to stay in the craziest shape and do nothing but hang around. When I go back to visit some of my colleagues now, and I see they are going on tour in Washington, or doing the same ballets, I could never think of myself in that position now—being in class and doing the same thing every day.”
When Millepied makes an appearance at Lincoln Center these days, his former peers greet him with a combination of affection and gentle ribbing. He was there briefly this spring, to polish a revival of “Two Hearts,” a 2012 collaboration with Muhly, and as he was preparing to leave the studio a dancer pulled out of a bag a sheaf of photographs for Millepied to sign. He complied, with some embarrassment, whereupon another dancer cast him a sardonic glance and said, “Hey, Ben, will you sign my bra?”
When Millepied moved to California, in 2011, he quickly made use of the access that his celebrity provided him. “Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, he just called me, introduced himself, and said, ‘I will be across the street, and let’s do something together,’ ” Jeffrey Deitch, the outgoing director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, told me. Millepied invited Deitch to his home, in Los Feliz, where he and Portman have occasionally hosted musical evenings. Other guests at Millepied and Portman’s parties have included Kate and Laura Mulleavy—the sisters behind the clothing label Rodarte, who designed austere black-and-white costumes for “Two Hearts”—and Ioanna Gika and Leopold Ross, who make up the band Io Echo. Last year, Millepied directed a Kabuki-inspired music video for their song “Eye Father.” Nico Muhly, who is a co-founder of the L.A. Dance Project, played the piano at one such evening. “What was extraordinary is that there were forty people coming over and we made all the food ourselves,” Muhly, who, like Millepied, is an accomplished cook, says. “Clearly, they could have had it catered—but Benjamin was up at seven, buying salmon. He poached so much salmon.”
As a result of the connection with Deitch, Millepied collaborated last summer with Mark Bradford, a visual artist based in South Los Angeles, in a presentation that took place in galleries at MOCA that were showing Bradford’s work. Deitch says, “It was not a conventional performance—Benjamin danced right into the crowd, and people had to scatter as he and the other dancers were coming through.” It was Millepied’s final public performance, though on occasion he still dances for a very small, private audience. “I dance for my son, so he knows his papa is special,” he told me. “I do pirouettes for him.”
Engaging with artists in media other than dance, and performing outside traditional venues, is, Millepied believes, exactly what ballet needs to expand its appeal beyond cognoscenti. “It is so hard in dance in America right now,” he told me in L.A. “There are no dance companies, there is no funding, and even fewer people come to the ballet in New York at Lincoln Center than when I started. But at MOCA we turned people away, and we have a young audience, and people coming to the ballet for the first time. All that matters to me.”
Darren Aronofsky, the director of “Black Swan,” told me, “A lot of people in the ballet world, which is a very insular world, are very focussed on their art.” Before connecting with Millepied, he could not interest anyone in the dance world in choreographing for his film: “Most people weren’t looking for collaborations. But Benjamin was very excited, and was clearly into cinema.” Last year, Millepied made a film of Lil Buck—an accomplished exponent of jukin’, a street dance that infuses breakdancing with smooth, balletic motions—dancing to the opening aria of the Goldberg Variations, transposed to guitar by Millepied’s older brother, Laurent. Millepied shot Lil Buck improvising in different street locations around Los Angeles. “He would listen to the music in the car, and then get out and dance,” Millepied says, noting that “when you watch him, and others in that movement, you find elements of Baroque dancing, of classical ballet, that they don’t have any idea existed.” Another recent Millepied video, “Medusa”—which features the dancers of the L.A. Dance Project diving and swirling underwater, wearing Rodarte costumes, set to Schubert—aims to evoke the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s paintings. It does, but it also suggests that Millepied finds it incredibly cool to have his own swimming pool to play around in, after years of living in an East Village walkup.
Even before the announcement of his appointment in Paris, Millepied was often absent from the L.A. Dance Project’s studio. He and Portman “live a little bit like gypsies,” he says: they try not to spend more than a week apart, and so when she is on location—as she was earlier this year, in New Mexico, shooting “Jane Got a Gun”—Millepied goes with her, conducting his meetings via Skype. Even when he’s at the L.A. studio, his larger cultural world has a tendency to spill through the doors. One afternoon when I was there, the performance artist Marina Abramović stopped by to watch Lugo and Eichten, tired from a day of dancing, perform their duet with an even more depleted languor than usual. Afterward, Abramović suggested that they should always perform it with their eyes closed. On another occasion, a stylist from Yves Saint Laurent visited, carrying a tuxedo that Hedi Slimane had designed; Millepied planned to wear it to parties that would follow the Oscars ceremony, which was being held later that week. Millepied withdrew to his cubicle, in a halfhearted gesture toward privacy—dancers keep few secrets from one another about their bodies—and then stood in the studio before the mirror, trying, with little success, to get his hands into the pockets of Slimane’s extremely fitted pants.
“So, are we going to Madonna’s party?” Morgan Lugo joked. Invitations to the singer’s after-party, at which dancers not trained by Balanchine perform astounding gymnastic and rhythmic feats, are highly coveted. Millepied shook his head. “It’s impossible to go to those things—if you can fit into a small bag, maybe I can fit you in,” he said.
Nathan Makolandra looked thoughtful. “I could do that,” he said.
Millepied’s celebrity was the cause of some skepticism among the dance community when he first arrived in L.A.; these doubts were amplified by the fact that his company, although named for the city, was made up entirely of imported dancers. (Some auditioned at Juilliard; Millepied found others through Facebook.) There has never been a strong dance scene in L.A., and Millepied considered the hostility to his efforts provincial. “When you are an outsider, you are looked down upon—there is this whole idea, ‘What are the intentions here?’ ” he told me. “We are building a not-for-profit. We are not trying to start a sweatshop.”
When the L.A. Dance Project made its début, at Disney Hall, in the fall of 2012, disapproval was largely replaced by critical approbation. In addition to presenting one of his own dances, Millepied revived two little seen works. One was “Quintett,” by William Forsythe, which the choreographer made in 1993, as his wife was dying. Millepied saw it in 2001, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “I was mesmerized—it is completely a celebration of life,” he said, adding, “It is very well structured, not showy.” He paired the Forsythe with “Winterbranch,” by Merce Cunningham, a notoriously inaccessible 1964 work performed partly in silence and mostly in the dark, with lighting by Robert Rauschenberg and a score, by La Monte Young, whose instrumentation includes an ashtray being rubbed against a mirror. “It is one of the four best pieces that Cunningham did,” Millepied says. “It is contemporary art—it is an installation you can’t walk out of.”
Critics praised his championing of the Forsythe and Cunningham pieces but were less enthusiastic about Millepied’s contribution, “Moving Parts,” a collaboration with Muhly and the artist Christopher Wool, whose oversized canvases the dancers pushed and pulled around the stage. Lewis Segal, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said that Millepied’s “very, very ordinary choreography was continually upstaged by the exemplary dancing and the cleverness of the staging.”
Millepied’s choreography has occasionally elicited raves: writing in the magazine Dance, Wendy Perron applauded a 2009 work, “Quasi Una Fantasia,” which was set to a darkly pulsing piece by Henryk Górecki: “With its daring choice of music, willingness to dig deep into the human psyche, and sure sense of choreographic flow, it’s a total work of art.” More often, Millepied’s work is judged to be technically accomplished, intelligent, and devoid of true inspiration. In 2010, Alastair Macaulay, the Times critic, said of a piece called “Plainspoken,” “Though I often wish several real choreographers had more of his resources, I certainly wish he had even a little of the expressive singularity, the creative peculiarity, that characterizes those choreographers we think of as artists.” (Macaulay has also disparaged Millepied’s work as “exclusively heterosexual.”) Mikhail Baryshnikov, for whom Millepied created a solo piece in 2006, told the dance writer Gia Kourlas that he admired Millepied’s determination but did not consider him a natural choreographer. “It’s like poetry,” Baryshnikov said. “Some people start to write little poems at the age of seven; some people open a little later. Everybody can come out with a little poem. Will you become a poet? It’s a question mark.” The comment stung. “Misha has been very supportive to me throughout the years about my work, and is a real believer, and he has certainly never said to my face that I wasn’t a natural choreographer,” Millepied told me.
Peter Martins, who has commissioned Millepied a number of times, told me that when he watches Millepied’s choreography he does not recognize Millepied, the dancer, in it: “I would look at some of the material and I would say, ‘I never saw him do any of those steps.’ It was like looking at two different Benjamins. He’s very influenced by different sensibilities: there is a lot of modern dance in his movement, very unique movements. He is developing his own little vocabulary, his own taste and style, which I guess is what everyone wants to develop.”
Millepied remains invested in his work as a choreographer, but his larger ambition is to make a case for the contemporary relevance of ballet, chiefly by presenting the work of artists other than himself. When the L.A. Dance Project first performed at Disney Hall, some members of the audience booed at the Cunningham piece, a response that Millepied anticipated and even welcomed. “There is a lot of confusion about where dance is, and how it is diminishing in the United States, and some directors think, Ballet needs to be young and sexy, so let’s do something commercial,” he says. But Millepied sees Cunningham’s collaboration with Rauschenberg as a model for how dance can make a claim for itself—not by pandering, in the manner of “Dancing with the Stars,” but by drawing in audiences who are literate in other spheres of the arts. “The Cunningham was difficult, but all that matters is the quality of the work,” he says. “I have no interest in doing this any other way. Art is going to make you uncomfortable. Ballet doesn’t have to be pleasing. It doesn’t have to be romantic.”
When “Reflections” was first performed, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, on May 22nd, it was not a conventional opening night but, rather, an elaborately produced dress rehearsal. Van Cleef & Arpels, which had underwritten the production with a substantial grant, had invited two hundred of its most important clients to a reception in the theatre before the performance. Alain Passard, the chef at L’Arpège, a three-star restaurant in Paris, had prepared a meal—lobster with turnip petals, monkfish, and sorrel, followed by rhubarb macarons—and circled in his whites, looking proprietary. The guests, some of whom had flown in from Hong Kong, wore evening gowns, and after the meal they filled the first balcony of the theatre. The crowd that usually attends a dress rehearsal—friends and employees—was in the next level up, peering down at the moneyed guests below, and taking pictures of Natalie Portman, who sat, demurely, in the front row, wearing a brocaded Dior gown.
The curtain rose to reveal Barbara Kruger’s set: a red backdrop printed with the word “STAY,” in enormous white letters, paired with a red floor bearing the words “THINK OF ME THINKING OF YOU.” Morgan Lugo and Julia Eichten entered from opposite sides and silkily danced the opening duet. Another movement was very different in tone: the dancers shifted from playful to combative, with Nathan Makolandra kicking the back of Eichten’s knee, making her crumple slightly; he slid to the floor, where she used her foot to raise him piece by piece—knee, elbow, small of the back, as if picking up something distasteful. The dance, which was performed on flat feet rather than on point, was delightfully herky-jerky and modern—as much Lil Buck as Balanchine.
The duet between Makolandra and Amanda Wells was still not entirely convincing. But the suite of dances had the effect that Millepied had intended: it conjured private interactions between questing individuals, whose meaning was left up to the viewer. (In L.A., Millepied had joked to me that the whole piece was, in a sense, about all the dancers being in love with Lugo.) After the dress rehearsal, Millepied spoke to members of the audience. “Everybody had a different story,” he told me, with satisfaction, the next day. “There was this woman—only in France, you know—who said, ‘It makes one want to make love.’ I think people see their own relationship in it: it’s about not being alone, or it’s about being sad. But it’s not. To me, they are just moments, and sometimes I end the story, and sometimes I don’t.”
We were at the Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera’s main residence, which stands at the head of the Avenue de l’Opéra; outside a window, the gray roofs and gray skies of Paris spread out before us. (The Paris Opera Ballet also performs at the Bastille.) Millepied and Portman are moving to Paris next year; between rehearsals and meetings, he viewed possible apartments, the choice governed by the joint constraints of celebrity and parenthood. “There are supposedly only two places we can send our kid to school,” he said, with skeptical dismay. He and Portman share “an appetite for a rich life,” Millepied says; neither of them has ever lived in Paris, and they consider the move a mutual adventure. Raising their son in a country with strict paparazzi laws also has its attractions.
The company has offices, studios, and costume shops in the rear of the Garnier building, reached by off-kilter staircases and mysterious doors that open to reveal wonders, such as a circular practice room tucked under the building’s verdigris cupola. Many of the dancers were on tour in Japan, but occasionally we passed members of the corps hustling past in tulle skirts, dressed for rehearsals of “La Sylphide.”
The dancers seemed unsure how to greet their new boss; some of them looked down bashfully at their ballet slippers as he passed. “Even the dancers who know me don’t necessarily know how to treat me,” Millepied, who was wearing jeans, a checked shirt, and sneakers, said. “It’s O.K.—I am not going to turn into a monster.” He told me, in a tone somewhere between horror and amusement, that students at the ballet school bow when their dancing masters pass by; there will likely be less bowing under Millepied’s regime.
When his appointment was announced, some observers worried that Millepied was unfamiliar with the company’s repertory. Moreover, he had spent only a total of seventeen minutes performing on the stage of the Garnier, appearing in Robbins’s “Suite of Dances,” in 2008. Some Parisians wondered if he really understood French ballet technique, which is known for its refinement, whereas American ballet is known for its energy. Some doubted his ability to run a company with a hundred and fifty-four dancers, noting that the L.A. Dance Project, which he will continue to advise, has fewer than a dozen. Others wondered if he would put his own ambitions above an institution to which they have devoted their lives. “The house is older than us,” Élisabeth Platel, the director of the École de Danse, told me, warily.
Platel said that she was reassured by the fact that Millepied was French, even if he had spent his adult life outside the country. (Elegance may not be an innate French quality, but it is true that Millepied can knot a cotton scarf around his neck in a manner unavailable to American men.) At the same time, company members who felt that the institution needed new ideas stressed his liberated, American qualities. “We are very lucky, because he is a very optimistic person,” Marie-Agnès Gillot, one of the company’s principal dancers, told me. “In France, we are not so enthusiastic and positive and energetic.”
The departing director, Brigitte Lefèvre, who remains in her post until October, 2014, had indicated that she preferred an inside candidate like Laurent Hilaire, a former principal dancer who is now the company’s ballet master. Lefèvre has set the tone of the institution for nearly two decades, presenting expressionist works by Pina Bausch and William Forsythe while conserving the company’s traditional repertoire—“Giselle,” “Swan Lake”—and the ballets of twentieth-century French choreographers like Maurice Béjart.
When I met Lefèvre in her office, she told me that she had thought of Millepied as a possible future director of the house a few years earlier, but had not imagined him as her successor when she announced her resignation, not least because he seemed committed to living in L.A. But she had been persuaded that it could be un beau challenge; she and Stéphane Lissner, the incoming director, “were really seduced—not only because he’s handsome but by his manners, his way of being.” Before his appointment, Lefèvre commissioned him to make a new production of “Daphnis et Chloé,” for the forthcoming season. “It was a step up for him—I like to help artists progress,” Lefèvre said, with a hint of condescension.
Friends and colleagues have warned Millepied about the enervating bureaucracy of France in general and the Paris Opera Ballet in particular. Peter Martins told me, “I said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ There are so many layers of authority—you have a Minster of Culture, you have a directeur général, and there’s such history. And there are the labor unions: people are always on strike.” (Several years ago, the company performed “The Nutcracker” in practice leotards, and without a full set or lighting design, because of strikes.) Charles Fabius, the founding producer of the L.A. Dance Project, was the program director of the Paris Opera for a decade, including the Nureyev era. “I tried very hard to give Benjamin a realistic picture of what was ahead of him, and I was not able to discourage him,” Fabius says. “I am concerned about his personality, and keeping his enthusiasm, and not being crushed by traditions.” Millepied is undaunted: “I want to do it all the way—I don’t want to do it and be, like, ‘Oh, my God, I might get fired.’ I might get fired, but I really want to follow my vision.”
Among the institution’s more restrictive aspects is the process by which dancers may be elevated through the ranks. To be promoted to soloist, a dancer must pass a test that is judged not only by the director but by a jury drawn from inside and outside the institution. The director has the right to choose only his principal dancers, or étoiles, who have, ideally, risen through the company’s hierarchy.
“That is a very, very frustrating, very strange way of running things,” Millepied told me, as we walked through the warren-like corridors of the Garnier, the floorboards creaking beneath our feet. “But that probably is a battle that I don’t need to fight.” He will insist, however, on making the ranks more diverse: the Paris Opera Ballet is overwhelmingly white and French. “I think there’s a girl from Argentina, maybe two from Asia,” Millepied said. “I can’t run a ballet company now, today, and not have it be a company where people in the house can relate to, and recognize themselves in some ways. So that is one thing I am going to be ruthless about.”
He also plans to invite visual artists to create installations in the Garnier’s grand public spaces, “so that it becomes like the Tate, or like the Palais Royale.” He hopes to open the first season that he is programming, 2015-16, with an existing production of “Giselle,” but in the ninety minutes before the ballet begins a work by Boris Charmatz, the experimental French choreographer, will be presented in the Garnier’s opulent public spaces. Possibly less crowd-pleasing will be a planned evening of three silent ballets, by Forsythe, Robbins, and Emanuel Gat, an Israeli choreographer. The program, Millepied said, is “about making people take a closer look. You go to see dance, you expect music. With these three ballets, you have this rhythm that is created by movement—that is really important. Choreography can create its own rhythm, and its own journey in space, with silence being the music.”
He plans to introduce new works by his New York masters, Balanchine and Robbins, into the repertory. “I want to bring work that really challenges your classical technique, and in which the entire young generation of the company dances, and the entire older generation of the company dances,” he told me. (“West Side Story” does not figure in his plans.) He also hopes to commission choreographers from his own generation: Christopher Wheeldon, who has never worked at the Paris Opera Ballet; and Alexei Ratmansky, with whom he is discussing a new full-length ballet.
Outside the cloistered world of the Garnier, of course, Ratmansky is canonical. A bigger risk, which Millepied plans to take, is to commission less tested choreographers, including Justin Peck—like him, a New York City Ballet dancer turned choreographer. (Peck is currently making a work for the L.A. Dance Project.) Millepied also has his eye on Crystal Pite, a Canadian choreographer who danced at the Ballet Frankfurt, under Forsythe’s direction, before founding an interdisciplinary company, Kidd Pivot, in Vancouver. “There is something completely modern about the equal relationships between men and women in her work,” Millepied says.
He expects to choreograph new work at the Paris Opera Ballet, but it’s not clear how much time he will have to express himself in this way. The sacrifice will no doubt be painful, but it may be worth it—the role of impresario seems one to which he is well suited. He becomes particularly animated when talking about composers. He has been courting John Adams to write a score for the company, and he has met with some younger composers, such as Andy Akiho, a doctoral candidate at Princeton who combines percussion instruments, such as the steel pan, with classical forms. Millepied also wants to use video more creatively, and spoke to me of commissioning the French director Rebecca Zlotowski to make a short film that airs at the beginning of an evening of live dance—something that could have an afterlife online, luring viewers to the ballet who had not before thought it interesting. Millepied said, “It is great when someone who has never been to the ballet goes, and they have an experience of some kind—a personal experience.”
We moved from backstage, where stagehands were lofting Corinthian columns for an operatic presentation, and entered the front of the house, with its imposing marble staircase and chandeliers. Millepied said that those who fear he will disregard tradition are mistaken. Although Aronofsky told me of his desire to present a “Black Swan” ballet in a theatre, Millepied blanched when I mentioned it. “Black Swan: The Ballet” will not be coming to the Garnier.
His interest lay in finding room for fresh thinking within the restrictions of the company’s traditions. “If I wanted to do a new ‘Swan Lake,’ for example, I don’t want to do a modern ‘Swan Lake.’ I want to present a really beautiful, classical ‘Swan Lake,’ ” he said. And then, with practiced grace, he skirted the tourists gawping at the monumental ceilings and descended the stairs to the lobby. ♦