Roland Petit
Crew
Biography
Roland Petit (13 January 1924 – 10 July 2011) was a French ballet company director, choreographer and dancer. He trained at the Paris Opera Ballet school, and became well known for his creative ballets. The son of shoe designer Rose Repetto, Petit was born in Villemomble, near Paris. He 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. Petit collaborated with Constant Lambert (Ballabile - 1950), Henri Dutilleux (Le Loup - 1953), Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint-Laurent and César Baldaccini 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 direct ballets for the largest theatres of France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Canada and Cuba. In 1968, his ballet Turangalîla provoked a small revolution within the Paris Opéra. Four years later, in 1972, he founded the Ballet National de Marseille with the piece "Pink Floyd Ballet". He directed the Ballet National de Marseille for the next 26 years. For the décor of his ballets, he would work in close collaboration with the painter Jean Carzou (1907–2000), but also with other artists such as Max Ernst. The creator of more than 50 ballets 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. He collaborated also with the nouveaux réalistes including Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. 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 his 1949 ballet Carmen, he made an unusual use of the en dedans, while he gave a non-figurative treatment to Turangalîla. Among the films to which he contributed are Symphonie en blanc by René Chanas and François Ardoin (1942 short film on history of dance) in which he appeared as a dancer; the choreography for the 1948 film Alice in Wonderland, The Glass Slipper in 1954, Anything Goes (with others) in 1956, and Black Tights as choreographer, writer, and dancer in 1960. In 1994, he was awarded the Prix Benois de la Danse as choreographer. In 1954, Petit married dancer Zizi Jeanmaire, who performed in a number of his works. His memoirs were published in 1993 under the title J'ai dansé sur les flots ("I Danced on the Waves"). He and Jeanmaire had one daughter, Valentine Petit, a dancer and actress. Petit died in Geneva, Switzerland, aged 87, of leukemia in 2011. Source: Article "Roland Petit" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Known For
The best in the performing arts from across America and around the world including a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.
Great Performances
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Champs-Elysées
The Ed Sullivan Show is an American TV variety show that originally ran on CBS from Sunday June 20, 1948 to Sunday June 6, 1971, and was hosted by New York entertainment columnist Ed Sullivan. It was replaced in September 1971 by the CBS Sunday Night Movie, which ran only one season and was eventually replaced by other shows. In 2002, The Ed Sullivan Show was ranked #15 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.
The Ed Sullivan Show
Le Grand Échiquier is a French variety television program created and presented by Jacques Chancel. It aired at 8:30 pm on the first channel of the ORTF from January 12, 1972 to July 12, 1972, then on the second color channel of the ORTF from September 1972 to December 1974, and finally on Antenne 2 from January 1975 to December 21, 1989. The program returned to France 2 on December 20, 2018 and is hosted by Anne-Sophie Lapix.
Le Grand Échiquier
No description available.
Samedi soir
After his plane crashes in Siberia, a Russian dancer, who defected to the West, is held prisoner in the Soviet Union. The KGB keeps him under watch and tries to convince him to become a dancer for the Kirov Academy of Ballet again. Determined to escape, he befriends a black American expatriate and his pregnant Russian wife, who agree to help him escape to the American Embassy.
White Nights
Wealthy American, Jervis Pendleton has a chance encounter at a French orphanage with a cheerful 18-year-old resident, and anonymously pays for her education at a New England college. She writes letters to her mysterious benefactor regularly, but he never writes back. Several years later, he visits her at school, while still concealing his identity, and—despite their large age difference—they soon fall in love.
Daddy Long Legs
A small-town shoemaker with a knack for spinning yarns, Hans encounters happiness and heartbreak on his road to becoming a full-fledged writer.
Hans Christian Andersen
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Sternstunde Kunst
This exceptional theatrical version of Lewis Carroll's 1865 classic features a combination of live characters and puppets.
Alice in Wonderland
The celebrated French choreographer Roland Petit had always had his eye on a film presentation of his ballet "Chaplin Dances", which premiered in 1991 and has been touring the world since, and he assigned this project to his trusted friend, Masayuki Suo, pioneer of the current revival of Japanese cinema. Drawing upon a wealth of worldwide ballet talent, Petit's ballet and Chaplin's films, Suo reinvented the work and has given it a new lease of life. The resulting piece is not simply a filmed record of the ballet but a union of the two media that reflects the meeting of the great talents of Chaplin, Petit and Suo
Dancing Chaplin
Lively scenes of Paris, all narrated by Maurice Chevalier, link together four dramatic ballet choreographies by Roland Petit: La Croqueuse de diamants (The Gold Digger), Cyrano de Bergerac, Deuil en 24 heures (A Merry Mourning), and Carmen.
Black Tights
A GI on furlough attends a Folies-Bergères show. He falls in love with a dancer, Claudie, the star of the theater.
An Evening at the Music Hall
Inspired by Goethe's early romantic play Clavigo, Roland Petit's ballet recounts the agonies of a weak-willed lover torn between the contradictory promptings of his heart and his evil spirit, which urges him to serve his own interests and forsake true love in favor of a life of debauchery. Recorded live at the Opera National de Paris, Palais Garnier, October 1999.
Clavigo
With Roland Petit’s cool, cabaret-style choreography and chic costumes by Yves Saint Laurent, Notre-Dame de Paris has been a modern ballet hit ever since its 1965 premiere. Petit’s deft condensation of Victor Hugo’s epic and tragic novel is now renewed by two stars of our own time, Roberto Bolle and Natalia Osipova: a stunning tribute to Petit’s genius after his death in 2011. Recorded live at Teatro alla Scala, Milan, March 2013.
La Scala Ballet: Notre-Dame de Paris
Pique Dame (or "The Queen of Spades") inspired by Alexander Pushkin, set to a music by Tchaikovsky; Passacaglia (or "Passacaille") set to a music by Anton Webern: two Roland Petit masterpieces brought together on one memorable evening at the Bolshoi Theater of Moscow. Recorded live, 19th of May 2005.
Большой балет: Пиковая дама/Пассакалья
Mikhail Baryshnikov and Zizi Jeanmaire sizzle in this ballet set to the music and story of Carmen.
Carmen
About the soloist of the Mariinsky Theatre of Opera and Ballet, the famous ballerina Irina Alexandrovna Kolpakova. The ballerina is shown in completely different situations — she conducts rehearsals, teaches, takes exams at the conservatory, learns English, rehearses numbers from the ballet 'Giselle,' and feels nervous before the start of a performance.
Irina Kolpakova
1966, 16mm.
Eloge De La Folie
Nicolas Le Riche and Marie-Agnès Gillot star in the legendary Roland Petit and Jean Cocteau's pioneering one-act ballet Le Jeune homme et la Mort. This 2005 production at the Opéra de Paris stays true to Petit’s original scenic and choreographic conception, from the dark, dingy apartment of the Young Man to the disturbing yellow dress and jet-black coiffe of the villainess. A mesmerizing drama in dance as virtuosic as it is unsettling!