Paris Opera Ballet News

[FLOSS]

Capybara, I am sorry if you think that I was stating the obvious about the effect which the POB school as feeder school for the company has on the way in which the company recruits its dancers. but at least one person posting about Joseph Aumeer seems to believe that the system is unfair.

 

 At the RB, as with many other companies,the recruitment process lacks transparency as offers of employment seem to be entirely in the gift of the artistic director and reflect his or her personal likes and dislikes. A change of director can mean a change of the type of dancers recruited. At the POB the recruitment process is transparent and the rules are known to the candidates. As part of the recruitment process all the candidates are required to perform a set variation in front of a panel of dancers drawn from the company. This in itself avoids the recruitment of dancers who give their best performances in class and ensures a certain level of quality and technical ability among those who join the company. The fact that the POB has survived for several centuries and has managed to maintain technical standards suggests that the systems it has in place work for it. The RB is less than a century old and has not always managed to maintain satisfactory technical standards within its ranks. 

 

 

The panel drawn from the company's dancers, including etoiles, assesses the ability and quality of the candidates seeking to fill vacancies in the company. The fact that it uses a two tier concourse system does not make it unfair as long as it applies the same criteria to both groups of candidates.The fact that it gives preferential treatment to candidates from its feeder school in order to preserve its style by holding the internal concourse first does not make it unfair either.The internal concourse is the one which really matters as it is the primary source of new dancers. The external one seems to be at best a way of topping up the recruits if the school does not produce enough dancers of sufficient talent in any one year and at worst a sop to those who believe that the school should not have a complete monopoly on providing recruits for the POB.

 

 As far as Joseph Aumeer is concerned I believe that he is a very talented dancer. I am sorry that he has not been appointed to the company but as I understand it the number of company vacancies for new male and female dancers in the forthcoming season is determined by the number of male and female dancers who have retired during the season. This year there were a limited number of vacancies for male dancers and there were none available to the external candidates. The fact that Aumeer was at the top of the list of external male candidates means that it is more than likely that he will get work at the POB if he remains in Paris

 

It is late in the year as far as job hunting is concerned but as I said in my earlier post he has time to apply to join ENB. I hope that he is not dwelling too much on what might have happened if he had taken up the offer of the RB apprenticeship. I am sure that his time working in Paris has given him valuable experience and that it won't be too long before we hear more of him. .

 

 

 

Edited July 10, 2017 by FLOSS

[Lizbie1]

5 hours ago, FLOSS said:

The fact that the POB has survived for several centuries and has managed to maintain technical standards suggests that the systems it has in place work for it. The RB is less than a century old and has not always managed to maintain satisfactory technical standards within its ranks.

 

 

POB has also had its share of ups and downs - I wasn't really around at the time but I don't believe it was much rated as recently as the 60s and 70s from what I've read. Others with longer memories can no doubt correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I don't want to cast judgement on the Joseph Aumeer situation but I don't believe the POB corps is even now the bastion of impeccable technique FLOSS makes out: Benjamin Millepied complained that only half of the corps are fit for the classics, with some dancers not having been en pointe in years; his successor's programming since can be read as a tacit admission of this - even with a company of 154 dancers at her disposal, scheduling more than 4 "classics" (using so loose a definition that it encompasses Onegin) would risk too many injuries - for more, read the series of tweets below.

 

Luke Jennings has also written about training deficiencies here: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/apr/02/midsummer-nights-dream-paris-opera-ballet-review-balanchine

 

I don't say all this to claim that RB is better than POB or any such nonsense (this isn't a competitive sport) or to make a case for Aumeer, but to venture an opinion that the POB school and its recruitment system is not infallible.

[FLOSS]

Lizbie 1 I don't think that I suggested that all was for the best in the best of all Parisian worlds or that the recruitment system in place at the POB was perfect. The recruitment systems in place in a company are the product of its corporate history. The POB's systems seem to be devised to ensure that dancers are 

recruited and promoted on the basis of merit rather than influence and favoritism which says quite a lot about the company's history and its past corporate experience. A secondary effect of the system is that it ensures that the majority, if not all, of the dancers which it recruits have received a training which guarantees that the company has a uniformity of performance style which few companies outside Russia are able to boast.

 

The problem for the POB is that however good a recruitment system may be at selecting the very best performers that in itself is no guarantee that the works which a company stages will be of any great quality or will be well cast or well danced. That depends on the artistic director his/her taste and his/her ability to control what goes on in the company.In the past in the case of the POB this boiled down to the relative power of the director and the company's star dancers When it comes to the choice of repertory it is the director of the company who has the greatest, if not entirely exclusive, influence over what a company's audience sees on stage but at the POB the Etoiles seem to have had a considerable power and influence over what they danced. There are stories that in the past Etoiles were in the habit of telling choreographers which steps they would be prepared to dance with the expectation that the choreographer would provide them with the choreography they had ordered. MacMillan is reported to have had a hard time when he went to the POB to stage The Song of the Earth and The Four Seasons. The Etoiles refused to dance in Song of the Earth because it was not sufficiently classical for them and would only dance in The Four Seasons. MacMillan was forced to assign the younger dancers to Song of the Earth and cast the senior dancers in The Four Seasons.

 

It has always seemed to me that the POB's weakness lies not in the method in which it recruits its dancers but in its corporate culture and its attitude to repertory. As the first ballet company ever established the POB seems to have great difficulty with outsiders appointed as its directors. History suggests that directors who are not part of the company "family" by training and tradition tend to have a hard time. Nureyev certainly did with the established senior dancers when he was director. Then there is its apparent obsession with the latest fashions in ballet. The fact that Lifar who was an outsider had a relatively easy time as the company's director until after WW II is almost certainly attributable to the fact that he was seen as the standard bearer of the Ballets Russes and therefore the latest thing in dance.Each director brings changes to a company's active repertory but with the POB these changes seem more radical than most where it appears to be quite normal to jettison the bulk of the outgoing director's.acquisitions. In spite of the number of works created for it during the nineteenth century very few of them were in its active repertory at the turn of the twentieth century. One of the few that survived was Coppelia .The company had managed to lose Giselle and did not reacquire it as a repertory piece until the 1920's. A choreographer director can be a strength but it can also be a weakness if, as in the case of Serge Lifar, the director is not that good a choreographer. I leave it to you to determine the main reason for the company's periodic weaknesses.

 

Please note I am not suggesting that the RB provides a better model. It has not reached its first century yet. Whatever its weaknesses POB has been around since the late seventeenth century and shows every sign of being able to continue for another couple of centuries without too much trouble. It is just possible that it is the strength of its feeder school and the way in which it selects its dancers which is the secret of its longevity and continued health as an institution. These after all are less subject to the whims of fashion than allowing 

the artistic director to recruit a company's dancers and  choose its repertory seems to be 

Edited July 12, 2017 by FLOSS

[MAX]

Aumeer removed the mention Paris Opera Ballet on his instagram account...

[MAB]

With regard to Serge Lifar, it is worth reading Ivor Guest´s history of POB, he makes it clear that from the very start Lifar was a reformer and was revered as such.  Before he took over the company had an unfortunate reputation that was nothing to do with dancing.

[invisiblecircus]

On ‎11‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 01:28, FLOSS said:

As far as Joseph Aumeer is concerned I believe that he is a very talented dancer. I am sorry that he has not been appointed to the company but as I understand it the number of company vacancies for new male and female dancers in the forthcoming season is determined by the number of male and female dancers who have retired during the season. This year there were a limited number of vacancies for male dancers and there were none available to the external candidates. The fact that Aumeer was at the top of the list of external male candidates means that it is more than likely that he will get work at the POB if he remains in Paris

 

It is late in the year as far as job hunting is concerned but as I said in my earlier post he has time to apply to join ENB. I hope that he is not dwelling too much on what might have happened if he had taken up the offer of the RB apprenticeship. I am sure that his time working in Paris has given him valuable experience and that it won't be too long before we hear more of him. .

 

 

Surely not. After all, only three of the RB apprentices were kept on so there would have been no guarantees either way. In his position, I would have chosen the POB contract and would stay in Paris now. It will be interesting to see what he does.

 

Perhaps a question for another thread but what's the deal with the ENB auditions? I saw them advertised, but are they regular ongoing contracts or short term just for one production? If it's the former, do they usually recruit in this way?