To that end Millepied will return in July to Los Angeles, where he still directs the LA Dance Project, a small contemporary dance company that he founded in 2012. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images
“I want to regain my freedom and I want to create,” he says.īenjamin Millepied and his wife, Natalie Portman. Instead, he has focused on the fact that the demands of running as large a company as Paris have proved incompatible with his personal ambitions to choreograph. Millepied, however, in explaining his motives for leaving the company has barely touched on these disagreements. Not surprisingly, a lot of the dancers took offence one told Le Monde that the atmosphere in the company had became “very stormy” in the wake of Millepied’s attack, another senior principal said he’d never experienced anything like it. It was sometimes as boring to watch as “wallpaper”. During a television documentary broadcast just before Christmas, he said that the company was in a rut, too attached to its strict hierarchical structure and far from being as “excellent” as it believed. He pulled no punches when he spoke in public about his mission to “bring a breath of air to ballet”. Yet Millepied, who was born in France but spent his adult career dancing and choreographing in America – was trying to deliver these changes with a bluntness that many in Paris found hostile. He seemed to be succeeding, as even in his first season, critics began to note a new zest and fluency.
Paris dancers have been renowned the world over for their elegance, precision and grace, yet they can also appear mannered and Millepied was urging his company to more expression, freedom and musicality in their performances. He planned to loosen its competitive system of grading and promoting the dancers, and to challenge complacency over its signature style. Most ambitiously, Millepied aspired to free the company from what he saw as its hidebound adherence to tradition. Meanwhile, he identified the importance of stimulating dance-making talent from inside the company ranks, and with the appointment of William Forsythe as an associate artist, he set in place an academy with a training programme to develop young choreographers. Millepied also spoke of restoring music and music-making to the heart of the company, with commissioned scores for some of the new works and collaborative productions with the opera company. As a choreographer himself, he planned to create new ballets in-house but he was also planning a dramatic increase in the number of new commissions, bringing in works from choreographers such as Wayne McGregor, Justin Peck and Crystal Pite whom he regarded as central to 21st-century ballet-making. Millepied arrived in Paris with grand plans for revitalising the company’s repertory.
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