Roland Petit Passes Away at 87
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.
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." 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.
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.
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.
