Into the Comfort Zone

PARIS — The star of the Paris Opera Ballet is in the ascent. Four years after the death of its former artistic director, Rudolf Nureyev, many leading critics consider it to be the finest classical ballet company in the world. In an article written for the New Yorker last summer, critic Arlene Croce found the company to be the only one of international stature that is stronger now than 10 years ago.

And she is not alone. During the full company’s weeklong stay in New York City, the New York Times’ mostly glowing reviews emphasized the “marvelous conviction and projection of technique that radiates the [Parisians’] refinement.”

“The joy of this company,” continued Anna Kisselgoff, “is the brio and clarity of its style.”

A selected group of dancers from this renowned company will perform under the name Stars of the Paris Opera Ballet at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday. Directed by Nureyev’s onetime dance partner Charles Jude, the company performs short ballets and excerpts from the traditional and contemporary classical repertory, and features French ballerina Florence Clerc, Jude’s wife.

In an age that favors high-energy athleticism in dance, Clerc is that most ephemeral of things: a Romantic ballerina. Every inch of her slender, harmoniously proportioned frame bears the mark of the rigorous training and hard work that leads to the title, yet she is also unusually relaxed and natural both on stage and off.

Indeed, Clerc’s ability to make herself accessible to audiences in spite of her guise as a ballerina represents the true mark of a great dancer. Patrice Bart, a prominent ballet master at the Paris Opera and a former partner, describes her as “a beautiful dancer. She is very warm on stage and very charming, feminine, lyrical and very giving.”

At age 45, Clerc is at the end of her career--she believes this American tour will mark her last performances--but is still confident about the qualities of her dancing. “I feel that I am in better shape now than ever before,” she says. “I feel really good. It’s a pleasure for me to dance because I’m no longer afraid, you see. It was very hard for me once to do the big classics like ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Raymonda.’

“When you’re 26 or 27, you’re so busy with all the steps and fighting to keep control of your body. There was a great deal of pressure. Now I’ve learned everything I could, there are not as many expectations, and I feel that I can truly seek the pleasure in the dance. And you know, this is really the most important thing.

“On this tour, I will be dancing with my husband, who is a glorious partner. Before, when we were younger, we would do nothing but fight. Now it’s different; they are happy moments for me. It’s difficult to dance when somebody wants to be the winner. With Charles, now, it’s not like that.”

Laurent Novis, a member of the “Stars” group who will appear in a new creation by Alexandre Proia, agrees that Clerc is at the height of her powers. “She fills the stage with her insights. It’s like a tender and knowing embrace,” he says.

“She has a wonderful being and way of breathing that is very pastoral,” says Brigitte Lefevre, the artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet. “Her movements convey something spiritual or philosophical even. It’s like seeing somebody thinking, like reflections.”

Since 1661, when Louis XIV instituted the Academy of the Paris Opera and classical dancing was codified by the ballet master Pierre Beauchamp, the language of classical ballet has been French. Although the origins of classical dance can be traced to the Renaissance courts of Italy, and ballet later came to be identified with the developments achieved in Russia by choreographer Marius Petipa at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet, there is a definite sense of identity, pride and custodianship of the art form at the Paris Opera Ballet today.

At home in the Opera Garnier, Paris’ world-famous 19th century opera house known as the Temple of the Dance, the Paris Opera Ballet is an enormously powerful and revered arts institution with a strict sense of hierarchy.

“The company is much stronger now than it was 20 years ago,” Bart says. “Then there were very good principal dancers but something was missing with the corps de ballet.” Never having been the instrument of a single choreographer but a repertory company, the Paris Opera Ballet was subject to a number of diverse artistic influences throughout this century.

Lack of focused artistic direction and discipline accounted for many of the company’s problems in the 1960s and ‘70s, when it seemed to be going astray. When Nureyev took over as artistic director in 1983, much of this changed.

“Before Rudolf Nureyev arrived, there were a lot of teachers who had their own ideas,” Bart says. “There was no clear direction and, perhaps, more mannerisms than dancing, more ‘froufrou’ than the real thing. When Nureyev arrived, he gave the company a new lease on life. He cleaned up the style.”

A powerful personality, Nureyev was able to take control of the vast administration of the company. The star dancer also impressed the political leaders of the French republic, who consequently increased state subsidies for an expanding repertory and a strengthening of the school.

Bart underlines that it is a traditional company. “The main quality of the Paris Opera Ballet is that everybody comes from the company school, where they have been trained from the age of 8 to 16. They all have the same look. I mean the legs of the girls, the height of the girls, the feet. . . . The movement is very clear and they have panache, they want to show themselves.”

Proia, a French-trained dancer formerly with New York City Ballet and now working as a choreographer in France and the United States, has misgivings about this approach to ballet: “The Paris Opera Ballet School is like a golden prison in a way,” he says.

“In [the Paris suburb of] Nanterre, they have been placed in this new building where they can’t get out for security reasons. With strained political relations to a number of African and Arab countries, bomb threats have been made.

“As people, they’re being oppressed in that school, but as dancers they’re very clean, they’re very together and it’s a whole. The breathing is very strained, they’re scared. But they are absolute beauties. The facility of these young dancers is astonishing, the bodies and feet of the people they choose are amazing.”

Now a teacher herself, Clerc is as much in awe of the young generations coming up as anybody. “They are the best in the world, but maybe they are a little scared,” she says. “It’s natural. The Paris Opera Ballet is probably one of the most competitive companies in the world. With 160 dancers, you have to really fight for your roles. Also the sense of rivalry is heightened every year, when the promotion competitions take place.”

The French system, in which promotions are awarded only after competitions, is unique. The top rank of “etoile,” meaning star, but being the equivalent of “principal dancer,” is bestowed at the discretion of the artistic director.

“It took me many years to find confidence and come into my own,” says Clerc, who did all levels of competition before she was finally appointed etoile by Violette Verdy in 1977. “In Paris, becoming an etoile is such an indescribably big thing, it took me a long time to realize I actually was one. The whole thing was like a dream. As an artist, I had to find my own way but wish somebody had given me the courage to enjoy dancing earlier. Certainly that is what I want to teach the young dancers of today.”

Clerc is the senior etoile on the American tour of the Stars of the Paris Opera Ballet, a company that features repertory and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet, yet which Lefevre hesitates to fully sanction. “It’s very hard to stop these tours,” she says. “The dancers like doing them and it’s a tradition. The tours take place during holidays when the dancers are supposed to be off. . . . When people don’t confuse these troupes with the real company, then why not?

“The Paris Opera Ballet can’t tour as much as we would like, and this way people all over France and in the rest of the world can have a taste of what the company is like and get a chance to see some of our best dancers. Among them Florence Clerc.”

To Clerc, the tour is a much appreciated opportunity. “I want to dance as much as possible and the ballets I’ll be doing show my range,” she says. “ ‘Raymonda’ is a very ‘technical’ ballet, difficult in terms of the steps that it employs, although this was not Nureyev’s main concern. When he taught me the ballet, he talked at great length about the character, about Raymonda who’s very strong, the richest woman in the world wearing all these precious jewels.”

“ ‘The Dying Swan’ is completely different--depicting a dying bird’s fight for life. Also, in France, we have our own way of doing it, which has nothing to do with the Russian way. The great French ballerina Yvette Chauvivre taught me this role: ‘It’s not just the arms, the port de bras,’ she said, ‘but very much about your soul.’ ”

Except for Jacques Garnier’s male trio “Aunis” and Proia’s new work (a pas de deux to be danced by Novis and Stephanie Romberg), the Cerritos repertory will be classical. Excerpts are scheduled from August Bournonville’s 19th century masterpiece “La Sylphide,” Petipa’s “Raymonda” and Lev Ivanov’s “The Nutcracker,” alongside Mikhail Fokine’s “Dying Swan” and George Balanchine’s “Apollo.”

Trying to avoid much of the pretense she detects in much modern ballet, Clerc doesn’t really like to talk about dancing. It becomes too literal, she says. “Truths are always simple and poignant and because of this, classical ballet will always have a future. Classical ballet has perhaps seen an ebb, but I do think it will come back . . . victoriously even. The romanticism of the art form--everybody understands that. I think people are a little bit tired. . . . They need the poetry.”