From fascinating, unconventional étoile to free solo dancer brimming with cross-disciplinary projects: Marie-Agnès Gillot’s new life. By Valentina Bonelli.
“You are not an artist unless you can move between disciplines, and that is even truer for us dancers.” Marie-Agnès Gillot has always thought so. Until last year the Paris Opéra’s most fascinating, unconventional étoile, she has far from disappeared after retiring from the French company. Her diary is fuller than ever with cross-disciplinary projects. Her collaborations are equally wide-ranging, with artists chosen “with the heart”, she explains. We now know that is how she makes her choices. Music, always live, has pride of place.
La Seine Musicale in Paris hosts her Soirées. After opening with Danse-là, Chante-là, with Carla Bruni among the guests, the ever-committed dancer devised From Paris to Beirut on 22 November. “Middle Eastern culture and thought fascinate me,” she explains, embarking on a danced concert with pianist Simon Ghraichy, of Lebanese origin. “A sublime performer, a virtuoso,” she enthuses, choosing Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s Huge among the works.
The successful Italian composer based in France tells us she heard the Deutsche Grammophon-commissioned work for piano and live computer months earlier at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and asked to collaborate. For the system linking music and video, with images by the composer, she wears a movement sensor and dances her own choreography. Baboni Schilingi also composed interactive interludes for Ghraichy, musical transitions to dance between pieces.
With her statuesque body and Renaissance profile, many remember Gillot at the Opéra as a creation of Carolyn Carlson and muse of Roland Petit. Both masters feature in From Rothko to Cocteau on 13–14 March 2020, with Insula Orchestra and solo instruments onstage. Against the painter’s canvases, Black Over Red was a solo Carlson, “her teacher”, created for herself. Gillot leaves her own mark, wearing the same scarlet tunic as in Signes, which earned her promotion to étoile.
Cocteau wrote the libretto for Petit’s existential ballet Le Jeune homme et la mort. At the Opéra she was death’s seductive image in Karinska’s yellow dress, also preserved on video; she reveals she is returning to one of her most cherished roles.
The unusual concert evening La Boxeuse Amoureuse on 20 April stages Arthur H’s music video, viewed three million times, with Gillot again in her own choreography, sparring in a duet with boxing champion Souleymane Cissokho. Boxing is new to her; she has taken it up this season because, she says, she loves it.
But Chorégraphie d’orchestre on 14 May brings her concept of a danced concert fully onstage. “Alongside Jean-Christophe Spinosi, I too conduct Ensemble Matheus in Monteverdi and his contemporaries. I do it with my body, anticipating entries and shaping pacing, like Bernstein conducting with his eyes.” Faites de la danse!, ending the season on 20 June, sees her lead a dance marathon from classical to hip-hop, Afro to disco. It is “the impulse to pass things on to young people” that made her choose teaching—provided it is interdisciplinary, and with live music.