Pierre Lacotte, ballet archaeologist, 1932-2023

Dance can be lost very quickly to the sands of time, but for over half a century, the French choreographer and dance “archaeologist” Pierre Lacotte fought to bring its history back to life. From his master stroke La Sylphide, a tribute to the Romantic era, to Paquita, The Pharaoh’s Daughter and Marco Spada, he worked to unearth the spirit and perfume of lost ballets.

“They are like members of my family,” Lacotte said in 2015 of his many productions. “I put in them everything that I loved and everything I was taught. I tried to recreate their style and sense of harmony, all to honour ballet.”

Lacotte, who has died aged 91, carved a niche for many decades in the repertoire of ballet companies worldwide, from his alma mater, the Paris Opera Ballet, to Russia’s Bolshoi and Mariinsky troupes. A notation-based reconstruction movement took hold around the turn of the 21st century, but Lacotte — ahead of his time — had already been defending a freer style of revival, informed by historical sources yet unconstrained by them.

Lacotte was born in 1932 to a well-to-do family in the Paris suburb of Chatou. A childhood birthday trip to the Palais Garnier, where he saw Lycette Darsonval and Serge Lifar dance Giselle, sealed his desire to dance. His father, an engineer at Peugeot, wasn’t pleased, but doctor’s orders — Lacotte was a frail child in need of exercise — prevailed.

He spent the later years of the second world war at the Paris Opera Ballet School, training under masters including Gustave Ricaux and Carlotta Zambelli in the Nazi-occupied capital. The Russian ballerina Lyubov Egorova, who taught him privately at the same time, was equally influential, and in 1946, at just 14, Lacotte joined what would become his primary artistic home: the Paris Opera Ballet.

He rose fast and was appointed premier danseur in 1953. Lifar created a role for him in 1950s Septuor, and he starred in works including Harald Lander’s Etudes and George Balanchine’s Le Palais de Cristal. He caught the choreography bug, and started creating pieces.

The heady postwar years favoured ambitious young choreographers, and in 1954 Lacotte — like Roland Petit before him — left the Paris Opera to build an independent career. He launched the shortlived Ballets de la Tour Eiffel, and appeared as a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. While there, he studied with Martha Graham, and saw himself as a “modern” choreographer. He made works to jazz and popular music, working with Sidney Bechet, Duke Ellington and Edith Piaf.

In 1961, Lacotte became party to one of the most headline-grabbing ballet moments of the 20th century: the defection of the Soviet-born Rudolf Nureyev at Le Bourget airport in France. The two had become fast friends during the Kirov Ballet’s Paris tour, in spite of KGB surveillance. When Lacotte went to see Nureyev off, he found him distressed at being sent home early, and helped to arrange his escape.

Lacotte’s shift to embrace ballet tradition and specialise in reviving lost ballets came in the late 1960s, after he married Ghislaine Thesmar, a gifted ballerina for whom he created many roles. When a leg injury forced Lacotte to step away from the stage, it was Thesmar who suggested he delve deeper into ballet history, one of his passions.

It led him to unearth a lost Romantic masterpiece: Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide, created in 1832 at the Paris Opera. Lacotte went on a years-long quest for historical material, from archives, reviews and fragments passed down by his teachers. In 1972, his reconstructed Sylphide premiered on television, starring Thesmar and Michaël Denard.

It was a sensation, and the Paris Opera Ballet took the production — an enchanting exercise in style, full of filigree footwork — into its repertoire. Many revivals followed, from other lost Taglioni ballets to 19th-century story ballets such as The Pharaoh’s Daughter, Ondine and Marco Spada.

Lacotte worked with companies around the world, but at the Paris Opera Ballet, his understanding of the French style — full of minute technical challenges, demanding painstaking musical articulation — became one of the main alternatives to the productions of his old friend Nureyev. There, he made his final, original three-act ballet, The Red and the Black, in 2021.

“I am born again through the talents of others,” Lacotte told the French magazine Paris Match then. At the age of 89, he still came to watch favourite new dancers in class. His ballet family now has a new responsibility: to carry the tradition Lacotte believed in forward, on stage.