Roland Petit. In Memoriam

We publish with some delay our tribute to the French choreographer and dancer Roland Petit (1924 – 2011) who died some days ago (July 10). From the Wikipedia:

Petit trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet school under Gustave Ricaux and Serge Lifar and began to dance with the corps de ballet in 1940. He founded the Ballets des Champs-Élysées in 1945 and the Ballets de Paris in 1948, at Théâtre Marigny, with Zizi Jeanmaire as star dancer; she would become his wife in 1954.
He collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint-Laurent and César and participated in several French and American films. He returned to the Paris Opéra in 1965 to mount a production of Notre Dame de Paris (with music by Maurice Jarre). He continued to rule ballets for the largest theaters of France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, and Cuba. In 1968, his ballet Turangalîla provoked a small revolution within the Paris Opéra.
In 1972, with the piece “Pink Floyd Ballet,” he founded the Ballet National de Marseille which he would direct during the next 26 years. (...)
Author of more than 50 creations across all genres, he choreographed for a plethora of famed international dancers. He refused the free technical effects; he did not stop reinventing his style, language, and became a master in the arts of pas de deux and of narrative ballet, but he succeeded also in abstract ballets.
''Le jeune homme et la mort'' (“The Young Man and Death”) of 1946 (libretto by Jean Cocteau) is considered his magnum opus and it is also his most well-known work; the choreography and the costumes are of astonishing modernity.

In 1983 he choreographed a Wuthering Heights ballet which none of the obituaries in the press seem to remember:

Les hauts de Hurlevent (Ballet National de Marseille)

Music by Marcel Landowsky
Choreography by Roland Petit
Story Edmonde Charles-Roux
Settings Renè Allio
Costumes Christine Laurent
Dancers: Dominique Khalfouni, Jean Charles Gil, Jean Pierre Aviotte, Luigi Bonino

Categories: Dance, In the News