The charms of Le Corsaire, the iconic nineteenth-century ballet, reside neither in the power of its plot, nor in its remarkable musical score, yet the public, choreographers, and dancers are frequently excited to see it back on the playbills of their theatres. Perhaps, most of us never completely grow out of adventure stories conveyed by exuberant dancing, set in colorful decorations with a touch of the exotic neverland. José Martinez, Artistic Director of the Paris Opera Ballet, presented his version of Le Corsaire at the Opéra National de Bordeaux at the end of the 2024–25 season. Martinez offered a fresh take on tradition, marked by a loving glance towards the ballet’s history and a light irony regarding its love-and-adventure story. By streamlining the ballet’s plot and compressing it to two hours, Martinez put his emphasis on dance, making it the blood and bone of the story - accessible to the public from all walks of life.

Ever since its 1856 production at the Théâtre Impérial de l’Opéra in Paris in the choreography of Joseph Mazilier, Le Corsaire’s libretto, delineation of characters, and the order of musical parts have almost always been in flux. Certain readjustments seemed necessary to keep the story of corsairs plundering the sea and the shore in step with changing realities. The libretto of Le Corsaire, produced by Jules-Henry Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Joseph Mazilier, was inspired by Lord Byron’s tale in verse The Corsair, written in 1814 - at a time when the romantic hero was synonymous with the spirit of freedom and political change. In the France of Napoleon III, such connotations had to be subdued in favor of the emerging Orientalist taste’s construction of the imaginary East. Hence, the ballet’s plot retained just the names of the lead characters: Conrad, the privateer seeking to pillage the Pasha Seid, an oriental mandarin with mythical treasures and a harem of women-slaves; Medora, the beautiful wife of Conrad, the pirate; and Gulnara, one of the wives in the harem, who saved Conrad from death in prison.

The Byronic romantic hero of loneliness and valor was not easily transposable into the medium of dance in the nineteenth century. Romantic ballets preferred to focus on the feminine type - undines and sylphs, ethereal and transformative creatures contrasting with the real world. With the ascent of the Orientalist taste, Byron’s story of Conrad’s liberation of slaves, Gulnara’s killing of the vile Pasha, and Medora’s dying of despair on a Greek island turned into a much lighter tale of love and abduction, with fights between pirates happening against the Oriental background of opulence, enclosed harem spaces, and ongoing slave trade.

Dance theatre clings to its medium’s imperatives. Despite Le Corsaire’s convoluted libretto and somewhat patchy musical score (at least four different hands contributed to the current version), the ballet became a propitious terrain for abundant dancing - on the city square, in the cave of corsairs, in the harem, and elsewhere. Dance as a non-verbal medium reduced the atrocity of the slave trade to mere decorum, focusing instead on the heated arguments among inebriated brigands, forms of sororities among the odalisques, and the love passions of the lead characters. Converted into dance, the imaginary Orient softens the viewer’s sensibilities, plunging them into different sensations provoked by boisterous male dances, elegant moves of odalisques, and poetic lyrical duets. Even in the erotic dream of Pasha Seid - the famous scene Le Jardin animé, added by Marius Petipa in 1868 to music by Léo Delibes - the dancers are arranged in perfect, Cartesian configurations corresponding to the alignment and intricate perspectives of a French garden. Not least, these odalisques are dressed in puffed skirts - called tutus in ballet language - and they twirl and swirl on pointes according to Western paradigms.

Filled with Oriental flavor and slave-trading episodes, Le Corsaire might appear controversial nowadays if one emphasizes too much the story and its characters. Martinez, however, does not change or readjust the story to current cultural sensibilities, but filters its nineteenth-century inspiration through playful irony, making it appear as a fairy tale, an animated comic, a chase-and-capture movie wrapped in some kind of historical decorum. His Le Corsaire becomes less propped by the story and more driven by jest, energy, and expressive and technically demanding dancing that creates characters. Martinez thus awakens today’s dancers’ desire to fuel the old ballet with fresh energy by turning its classical conventions into a playful framework for rigorous technical display and artistry.

Martinez’s Corsaire narrates the story with cinematic dynamism, keeping the public alert and curious for the next scene to arrive. The Oriental flavor serves as handsome candy wrapping for a story that adds picturesque rather than ethnographic background to the pirates’ adventures. Using sets based on projection and clever lighting applications -created by Luis Perdiguero and Iñaki Cobos Guerro (the latter conceived the striking costumes as well) - Martinez again underscores the artifice of the story, performed within the codes of academic dance.

According to his artistic credo of staying within the tradition but also making it palatable and attractive to the current public and dancers, Martinez preserves almost all the precious nuggets of the “traditional Corsaire,” known from Petipa’s several versions - or what survives of them in the hands of posterior choreographers - namely the pas d’esclaves as the deux of Gulnara and Lankedem, the trio of odalisques, the scene of the Jardin animé with the solo variations of Gulnara and Medora, and the final pas de deux (or pas de trois with the slave Ali in some versions), known today in Vaganova’s choreography. These familiar parts of the ballet are instantly recognizable, yet every duet or male/female variation has a touch of Martinez’s own vision. In Martinez’s version, the female variations - particularly diagonals - change directions more often and are peppered with intricate small technique and various combinations of pirouettes; his male variations seem airier and technically elaborate, carrying a gleam of today’s French style. Group dancing in Le Jardin animé demonstrates perfect geometry in formations, yet it does not overburden the scene. Sixteen dancers move with elegant postures characteristic of academic style, yet they remain women in soft tutus rather than the expanding decorative ornaments in the Petipa version. In a word, Martinez’s complete classical pedigree allows him to compose his version of a classical ballet as variations on a theme - recalling the nineteenth-century musical form of “theme and variations.”

Another strong asset of Martinez’s Le Corsaire is the sequence of character dances that sweeps the stage and delivers a different heartbeat to the classical order of movements in other scenes. Musically, Le Corsaire remains a pastiche of enticing, easy melodies, where the rhythms of waltzes and mazurkas from nineteenth-century ballrooms stand in for the Greek-flavored dances of pirates. The choreographer lets the bravura of character dancers be present at full, with its range of complex steps and lifts, proving again how tightly character dances were woven into the fabric of nineteenth-century ballets—and what rich possibilities they offer today’s dancers. Not to forget the public, who always appreciate the sheer excitement that ingeniously crafted character dances deliver.

Before the production of Le Corsaire at the Opéra National de Bordeaux, Martinez staged this ballet in 2022 for the Opera di Roma, in 2023 for the Royal Ballet of Sweden and the Slovenian National Ballet, and in 2024 for the National Ballet of Estonia. Each of these iterations reveals Martinez’s judicious approach to staging classical repertoire for today’s dance companies - and notably, for companies of different traditions and scales. It seems that Martinez, who as a choreographer masters academic vocabulary to perfection, pursues this “editing” process to achieve the most effective way of making this staple of classical repertoire relevant and appealing to current audiences. His versions never exactly repeat each other, and the transfer of the production is not mechanical, as the choreographer himself and his assistant Agnès Letestu, étoile of the Paris Opera and Martinez’s partner on stage for many years, immerse each company’s dancers and soloists in performing this ballet. The results of this refitting for each company made the Bordeaux production especially admirable.

In the two distributions I saw in July in Bordeaux, Riku Ota’s interpretation of Conrad, Diane Le Floc’h’s Medora, and Perle Vilette de Callenstein’s Gulnara were quite distinguished, though these dancers did not appear on the same night. Marini Da Silva Vianna’s Medora (she danced with Riku Ota) was loving and fragile in duets, though a bit restrained in her solo appearances. Tangui Trévinal and Neven Ritmanic developed the vile sides of Lankendem’s character, while Kylian Tilagone approached the role of Pasha Seid with light humor and punchy details, creating a zany, dreamy ruler whose coffers of gold could not buy him the happiness he desired. Melissa Patriarche and Simon Asselin were excellent as Zulmea and Birbanto, giving spirited performances in the dances of the corsairs.

The true success of this production, however, belongs to the ensemble of dancers of the Opéra National de Bordeaux and those who were invited to supplement the company for this production. The accelerated rhythms and tonicity of the ballet came from the unity and élan of the company, as well as from the conducting of Maria Seletskaya, who was extremely sensitive to the theatricality of dancing. The music of Adolphe Adam, Léo Delibes, Riccardo Drigo, and Cesare Pugni - performed by the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine - folded into a seductive tapestry under her baton.

Martinez’s Corsaire made an exuberant close to the season for this remarkably strong company. Its bright, festive theatricality attracted a public of all generations, with dancing standing at the core of the production from the first scene to the last. Converting the story into a comedy with transparent good and bad characters resonated with the public. Moving the action through prolific dancing—performed by enslaved women, city folks, eunuchs, pirates, corsairs, and dream phantoms in pink tutus, occurring in a city square, a grotto, or a seraglio—was Martinez’s response to the persistent question of how to keep classical repertoire alive and, more importantly, how to reinvigorate it.