Paris Opera Ballet’s Cri de cœur — a three-hour collage of nervous breakdowns

A “cry from the heart” — to borrow the title of Alan Lucien Øyen’s Cri de cœur — filled the Palais Garnier this week, and it didn’t come from the stage. As the curtain fell on the first half of Øyen’s never-ending world premiere, someone yelled, loud enough for the entire audience to hear: “Let’s all thank Aurélie Dupont for this crappy production.”

Dupont resigned as artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet at the end of last season and Cri de cœur is a late entry to the list of baffling commissions that defined her six-year tenure. In the absence of a replacement for Dupont (the recruitment process is under way), there was presumably no one to tell Øyen that his three-hour collage of nervous breakdowns required a drastic edit.

Norway’s Øyen has long styled himself after Pina Bausch; in 2018, he was one of the first outside choreographers to make an evening-length work for her Tanztheater Wuppertal. Alas, he is no Bausch, just as the Paris Opera is no Tanztheater. (It’s not for lack of trying: Kontakthof will be the next work of Bausch’s to join the repertoire, in December.)

The depth of research and lived experience that is part and parcel of the best Tanztheater works simply isn’t there. Cri de cœur’s big novelty is to have POB’s dancers speak onstage — making the experience of non-French speakers forced to rely on subtitles above the stage that much more painful, even though the cast acquitted themselves as well as the platitude-heavy script allowed.

The slight, fragmentary narrative is structured around Marion Barbeau, a charismatic soloist whose acting career was recently kick-started by Cédric Klapisch’s latest film En Corps, cast here as a woman dying from cancer. Around her, there is Antonin Monié as an imaginary friend of sorts, Nobody; former Wuppertal star Héléna Pikon, underused as a mother figure; Laurène Levy as a pet lizard, who slithers about while talking about flies; and Simon Le Borgne, Barbeau’s real-life ex-boyfriend.

We know this, awkwardly, because Øyen’s whole shtick is to blur the lines between fiction and reality. (Did you know the two sometimes intersect? Huge if true.) The dancers joke about POB’s hierarchy and at one point stage an AA-style meeting that may or may not be about their own depressive episodes. There are plenty such random, self-indulgent scenes, interspersed with choreography that might have worked in small doses — limbs reaching precariously into space, darting hands and deep pliés, as if the dancers were rewinding through recent repertoire by Ohad Naharin, Hofesh Shechter and Mats Ek.

It all culminates in the corps de ballet shuffling mournfully to the music of Max Richter, the coup de grâce in a mawkish, uncredited score, as Barbeau expires at last. If this sounds appealing, catch Cri de cœur while you can, because there likely won’t be another opportunity.

★★☆☆☆

To October 13, operadeparis.fr