"We are a different company" said Alice Psaroudaki, Artistic Director of Ballet de l’Ouest Parisien, in our conversation last summer. It sounded intriguing to me, yet I did not insist on asking her immediately about what precisely distinguishes her company from others. Surely, I told myself, a company of eight dancers ought to have something truly special about it. This one cannot be compared to some giants, like the Paris Opera Ballet or even to some middle size companies of twenty-some dancers, like Ballet Preljocaj, to draw on some familiar French examples. In Le Ballet de l’Ouest Parisien each dancer brings more than one’s technical skills to the table. It is a company where each dancer’s personality matters. This constellation of dancing characters, in which every dancer is a member of the corps de ballet and a soloist at once, allows Alice Psarodaki to concoct a rich palette of stories that her dancers create through movements, suffused with emotions.

Is it there, where the company’s distinction resides? The 2024 annual summer recital, that the company presented on June 1 in the theatre SEL in Sèvres, where the company is based, strongly suggests that. Eight short ballets, showcased during the evening, offered the public the stories of love, memories, despair, creative impasses, and much more, as dance—like poetry, the visual arts, music, and cinema—produces multiple associations and allows each viewer to fill in a suggested narrative with one’s own reflections. Indeed, for Alice Psaroudaki dance is an autonomous art with its own set of creative tools, yet she seeks its expressiveness in the challenging intersections with other arts. The theme of the recital—Arts Fusion—points to the thread that assembled eight pieces together. Almost all were born in contemplation of other arts: literature, music, or sculpture. In Psaroudaki’s vision, the ideas solicited from other arts became embodied and create new sets of associations by communication with the public by means of dance.

The program of the recital included four earlier pieces by Psaroudaku—« Le Souffle du Printemps », « Look! », « Rêverie « (also inspired by a sculptural work by Cris Pereby) and « Aperto Libero »—that the company already had in their repertoire. To the delight of company’s followers, four others were new. Among the four new works, two were conceived and composed by dancers from the company: » Je chante pour passer le temps » based on the poem by Louis Aragon and put to music by Daniel Sabathié choreographed and performed by Emilia Sambor and « Gnossienne, » created by Athina Klironomou and Serge Mouawad. Both pieces fell fully into the air of the recital, which resembled a creative atelier, a gathering of kindred spirits, to which the public was generously invited.

The evening opened with the ballet « Auria, » a 2024 creation by Alice Psaroudaki inspired by the series of sculptures by Patricia Maze. Five sculptural objects (L’envolée, Angha, Sagarika La Vague, L’extase, et Lâche Prise) impersonated by dancers release a desire for movement embedded in them. As a result, the sculptures, projected onto the back curtain, become more than living sculptures but animated ideas in dancers’ bodies, as they acquire air, breath, life, and soul—all multilayered meanings of the old concept of anima. This series of dances is contrived by Psaroudaki with a true sense of theatrical enigma: living sculptures tell their stories but never fully reveal their secrets.

Psaroudaki’s second new work for the evening was a ballet « Nevermore, » inspired by the eponymous poem by Paul Verlaine and set to music by Daniel Sabathié, was a fortunate addition to the evening, as it developed both choreographically and poetically the theme of the artist as an eternal itinerant, in constant search of her identity, harmony, inspiration, and love.

I have been aware for a long time now that the selection of music is one of the crucial factors in Psaroudaki’s choreography. She prefers the music that is strongly emotive, be it classical or contemporary. In the recent recital, her predilection towards the the language of classical dance, musical sensuality, and dramaturgical intensity became even more evident. Moreover, Psaroudaki demonstrates in robust fashion her vivid sense of dance as theatre, as a performative event. Her dancers change characters, offering the public a variety of impressions to carry with them. One cannot miss the dramatic subtlety of her dancing passages but also her telling usage of props, such as curtains, elements of wardrobe, and even everyday objects.

The 2024 recital in Sel, Sėvres, proved that the company has an established identity, emerging under its artistic director’s uncompromising vision of form and expressivity in dance. As for the difference that I tried to resolve for myself since the last year, I would not want to pin it down with some concrete definitions but to suggest that , in my view, the company evolves as a dancing theatre for choreographic short stories and also, more and more convincingly, as a laboratory or an atelier for merging the language of movement originating in academic dance with other arts, visual and poetic alike. I hope that Parisians and the French capital’s visitors will have more opportunities to discover this company in the coming season. Paris, as one of the world capitals of dance, needs more dance and more different kinds of dance.

Tatiana Senkevitch
Paris Institute for Critical Thinking
Doctor in Fine Arts

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