Roland Petit’s Telegraph Obit

Roland Petit and Cyd Charisse in Black Tights 1960

This obit provides a more European perspective on RP’s life.

The Telegraph
Wednesday 13 July, 2011
Theatre Obituaries

Roland Petit

Roland Petit, the choreographer who died on July 10 aged 87, was France's major creative figure in post-war ballet, responsible for defining a new French chic and erotic frankness in dance, typified above all by his wife, the glamorous star Zizi Jeanmaire. He was also probably the favorite choreographer of the world's greatest ballerinas.

An outstanding classical dancer as a youth, Roland Petit swiftly decided on a career as a rebel against the traditionalism of the Paris Opera Ballet, and before the age of 25 had created two of his most iconic ballets, Le Jeune Homme et la mort and Carmen, with the sultry young Jeanmaire as the lethal female destroying a hapless male in both.

These ballets caused a sensation worldwide and Petit and Jeanmaire swiftly became the most exciting names in French dance, closely associating with Jean Cocteau, Edith Piaf, Yves Montand and the new intellectuals of Left Bank Paris.

However Petit was also wooing Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina of Sadler's Wells Ballet, with whom he was having an affair. Fonteyn had cosmetic surgery to shorten her nose at his suggestion (though the operation was redone in London). When still in her twenties, she seriously considered leaving London to join him in Paris, which prompted his other mistress, Jeanmaire, to issue him with an ultimatum.

To reassure Jeanmaire, Petit created Carmen, an encapsulation of Bizet's opera in ballet, which premiered in 1949 at the Prince's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and became an instant world hit. Jeanmaire bobbed her hair short and wore a scant black corset, which, coupled with the candid seductiveness of her pas de deux with Petit, caused both shock and delight among the crowds who rushed to see it. One observer commented that he could see men's trouser buttons popping during the performance.

But the leading English choreographer, Frederick Ashton, then developing into a classical dancemaker of genius at Covent Garden, mourned that he would be seen as out of date.

Fonteyn herself soon decided that a Parisian ballet life with Petit would be more about style and short-term effects than about durably challenging choreography, and she resumed her career with the Sadler's Wells Ballet.

Petit and Renée Jeanmaire married in 1954, and the choreographer reinvented her as "Zizi", one of the immortal icons of Parisian nightlife.

Roland Petit was born on January 13 1924 in Villemomble, a Paris suburb, the elder son of a French café owner and an Italian shoemaker. His mother, Rose Repetto, would leave to set up the Repetto dance shoe business, now an international concern. His father,

Edmond Petit, encouraged his young son in dance lessons and at just 16 he was accepted by the Paris Opera Ballet, then suffering the first straits of the Second World War.

Fast-tracked as a soloist by the director Serge Lifar (Diaghilev's last protégé) the teenager was much influenced by the cosmopolitan artistic intellectualism erupting in wartime Paris, and was taken under the wing of two leading Diaghilev associates, Jean Cocteau and Boris Kochno.

At the end of the war, aged 21 and with backing from his father, Petit founded the anti-establishment Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées, taking two unorthodox but brilliant young dancers with him, Jean Babilée and Renée Jeanmaire, who would become icons of the new French dance.

Petit reinvented the suffering, virginal ballerina as a provocative, irresistible femme fatale of the modern day. His post-war works remain some of his most enduring, Les Forains, Le Jeune Homme et la mort (for Babilée), Les demoiselles de la nuit (for Fonteyn in Paris), Carmen, Le Loup, Cyrano de Bergerac and Notre-Dame de Paris, boldly theatrical in design, all recently performed by Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet among other companies.

When Petit and Jeanmaire toured the Ballets de Paris to Hollywood in 1955 his charm conquered Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth, among others. Showered with Hollywood invitations, to Jeanmaire's chagrin he chose a younger lookalike, Leslie Caron, to be the lead in his 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs. He also choreographed the films Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye and Zizi Jeanmaire, The Glass Slipper, again for Caron, and Folies-Bergère, with Jeanmaire and Eddie Constantine.

He made the film Black Tights (1960) to show Zizi Jeanmaire's magnetic balletic gifts alongside Cyd Charisse and Moira Shearer, but he now set about reinventing the Paris revue around his wife, exploring new levels of luxury and sophistication for her many talents. Not only did Jeanmaire dance like an angel in any style, dressed flamboyantly (and sometimes minimally) by costumiers such as Erté, but she possessed an alluring singing voice and a worldly verbal wit that sold countless records.

They became the power couple of Sixties Parisian cultural life, wearing Yves Saint Laurent and collaborating with Andy Warhol.

Petit briefly returned to his alma mater, the Paris Opera Ballet, as director in 1970, but quit after a few months to buy the Casino de Paris specifically to feature Zizi in a supercharged new kind of music-hall, which flourished for five years.

In 1972 he took up leadership of the Ballet de Marseille, to which for the next 25 years the world's major ballerinas beat a trail, Maya Plisetskaya, Natalia Makarova, Alessandra Ferri and Altynai Asylmuratova among them, seeking to dance his flagrantly attractive female roles.

Meanwhile his early ballets proved a magnet for the great male ballet stars of the 1970s. Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov filmed Le Jeune Homme and Carmen, each partnering the evergreen Jeanmaire. Later Petit would choreograph for Baryshnikov's 1985 feature film White Nights.

In Britain, however, Roland Petit remained derided as a showman, compared unfavorably with the Royal Ballet's choreographers Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. Petit created three ballets for Covent Garden, the slight Ballabile (1950), and two late Fonteyn-Nureyev vehicles, a pop-art Paradise Lost (which Mick Jagger loved) and a Pelléas et Mélisande, both of which were given discouraging critical receptions.

English National Ballet offers a rare British viewing of his more durable works, Carmen, Le Jeune Homme et la mort and L'Arlèsienne, at the London Coliseum next week, which Petit was overseeing when he died at home in Geneva.

Among his unusual ventures were the only ballet Orson Wells ever devised, The Lady in the Ice (1953, London), a 1972 Pink Floyd ballet and a Swan Lake with male swans (1998).

Among his many honours, Roland Petit was a Commander of the Légion d'honneur and a Commander of the French Order of Merit. His wife, now 87, and their daughter, Valentine Petit, survive him.

Roland Petit, Choreographer, Dies at 87

Zizi Jeanmaire and Roland Petit in Carmen

The New York Times
July 10, 2011

Roland Petit, Choreographer, Dies at 87; Conquered Ballet Taboos and Hollywood

By ANNA KISSELGOFF
Roland Petit, France’s leading choreographer after World War II, who swept away time-honored ballet taboos and whose mix of entertainment and art also made his work popular in Hollywood, died Sunday in Geneva. He was 87 and had lived in Switzerland for more than a decade.

His death was reported by his wife, the ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire, the Paris Opera Ballet said.

Although Mr. Petit choreographed cheerful films like “Hans Christian Andersen” with Danny Kaye, sex and suffering were the themes of the two early ballets that became his international signature pieces: “Carmen” and “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.”

Mr. Petit stunned dance and theater audiences in London in New York in 1949 with a frank new eroticism in his ballet version of “Carmen.” Renée (later Zizi) Jeanmaire was the femme fatale in a short tunic and a gamine hairdo who seduced Mr. Petit, as Don José, in an acrobatic duet on the floor. The headline of the positive review by The New York Herald Tribune’s dance critic, Walter Terry, read “Sex and More Sex.”

John Martin, the critic for The New York Times, was less impressed. “Passion and the classical pas de deux are poles apart,” he wrote.

“Carmen” might have been directly accessible in its stylized realism. But Mr. Petit, a dancer as well as a choreographer, displayed a deeper side in his 1946 masterpiece, “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort” (“The Young Man and Death”). Here, he showed the resonant poetic dimension seen in the pieces in which he collaborated with some of France’s major writers, poets, composers and visual artists.

For “Le Jeune Homme,” Jean Cocteau devised a scenario about a bohemian painter in his garret, ostensibly waiting for his sweetheart but eventually embroiled in an existential battle for survival. Jean Babilée, that ballet’s unforgettable star (who also contributed some of the choreography), smoked a real cigarette onstage on a real bed, looked at his real watch and kicked real furniture around before engaging in a violent confrontation with his girlfriend.

The painter hanged himself in despair and his lover revealed herself as an allegorical figure of death before leading the antihero across a surreal rooftop panorama of Paris. Cocteau’s typical touch of the mythic made commonplace fused wonderfully with Petit’s naturalism (as opposed to realism) and use of ballet bravura.

A metaphor for postwar disillusion, the ballet struck a nerve in Europe but also impressed in New York when Ballet Theater presented it in 1951, with Mr. Babilée and Nathalie Philippart.

But it was also an experimental, conceptual work. After the cast had rehearsed it only to jazz, Cocteau suddenly substituted Bach’s Passacaglia for the performances.

Working within two extremes, as represented by the show-business-flavored "Carmen" and the poetic “Jeune Homme,” Mr. Petit remained a subject for debate throughout more than a half-century, in which he choreographed some 150 ballets.

American critics often called him chic. Even French critics began to find him superficial. Yet after he turned to creating ballets based on opera and literature, he could surprise.

In New York in 1980, the National Ballet of Marseille (headed by Mr. Petit since 1972), presented Mr. Petit’s eloquent commentary on Marcel Proust and his work in “Marcel Proust Remembered.” Ms. Jeanmaire carried his ballet version of “Fledermaus” in “The Bat.” His updated view of “Coppélia” had a witty if kinky approach: as Coppélius, he waltzed with a female dummy (the doll Coppélia) strapped to his body.

Karen Kain, now artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, was a guest artist in this “Coppélia.” Among the many ballet stars for whom he choreographed were Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Maya Plisetskaya, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova. Both Mr. Baryshnikov and Mr. Nureyev danced in “Jeune Homme” shortly after they left the Soviet Union for the West.

Mr. Petit also developed the talents of two future stars. When he co-founded Les Ballets des Champs-Élysées, he engaged two teenage dancers, Leslie Caron and Violette Verdy.

Roland Petit was born on Jan. 13, 1924, in Villemomble, near Paris. His father, Edmond Petit, had a restaurant in the Halles district; his mother founded the dancewear company Repetto. Fond of dancing to a player piano in the restaurant, the young Roland was enrolled in the Paris Opera Ballet School at 9 and joined the company’s corps at 16.

Chafing at the company’s restrictions, he left to choreograph in a series organized by the critic Irene Lidova. These performances led Mr. Petit and Lidova to found Les Ballets des Champs-Élysées with Boris Kochno, Serge Diaghilev’s collaborator and secretary.

Mr. Petit left in 1947 to form his own company, Les Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit. Wooed by Hollywood, he choreographed “Hans Christian Andersen” in 1951 before marrying Ms. Jeanmaire, who survives him, as does their daughter, Valentine Petit. Among the other films he choreographed were “Daddy Long Legs” (1955) “The Glass Slipper” (1955) and “Anything Goes” (1956).

Mr. Petit returned to Paris to choreograph for ballets and music hall revues (some starring his wife). He briefly served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet but resigned after a dispute and later moved to Marseille, where he was director until he left in 1998, reportedly in a disagreement with the management.

Like Maurice Béjart, Mr. Petit sought to reach a wide audience. Yet he had a more solid choreographic foundation, and his early ballets work on an artistic level still valid today.

Ms. Lidova once admitted that Mr. Petit could fall into a “Champagne style.” But she also noted, rightly, that he was an artist of contrasts, “who can be both frivolous and serious, passionate and cruel.”

Personal comment: I first remember seeing Roland Petit in a video of the 1960 film Black Tights with Moira Shearer, Zizi Jeanmaire and Cyd Charisse. Black Tights as well as The Red Shoes were the two films that reinforced my desire to be a ballet dancer.