But it is hard to escape the feeling that the real drama comes from the pit, under the baton of Vello Pahn, and the formidable choral body that is the singers.

It also draws particularly impressive turns from Takeru Coste and Antoine Kirscher. The piece danced in full exclamatory mood and at high-octane pace, is performed with conviction by its 18-strong cast.

In Pontus Lidberg’s Les Noces, movement explodes in another direction. When a dancer lies on a coach and consumed by billowing smoke dissolves into the background, one can’t help but wonder if that is all there is to this. It’s almost always the same set of repetitive frenzied movement at different degrees of intensity that, though impressive in itself, inevitably ends at the limits of the dancer energy rarely radiates outwards. Goecke’s movements bear little relation to the score, either formally or in idiomatic register.

Emilie Cozette, Heloise Bourdon and Sae-Eun Park in Dogs Sleep by Marco Goecke Photo Ann Rayīut if Dog’s Sleep starts with something important to say, it quickly descends into a fractured musical experience. Though it is a rather disingenuous move to aim at the erasure of everything human (Goecke’s signature dance-language is based on deconstruction and fragmentation) only to suggest through its quasi-Frankenstein, humanoid form that there might be value in it after all, it is at least, in a world consumed by rupture, fair warning. And so, while one half of the company dances Swan Lake at the Bastille, the other half finds its way to the Garnier for a contemporary evening of works by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Marco Goecke and Pontus Lidberg.Īt the end of Marco Goecke’s Dogs Sleep, a solitary dancer attempts a waltz, a jagged jiggle which feels unbearably sad like a puppet Petrushka pulled on a string trying to mimic its human manipulators. For the Paris Opera, an institution that is in its 350th year of existence, that reputation is anchored by a twin drive for classical excellence and cutting-edge innovation.

With paris opera pulls together