In May of 2024, José Martines, Artistic Director of the Paris Opera Ballet, just short of his first full year in new capacity in Paris, announced the creation of the Junior Ballet under the auspices of the main company. In July of 2024, after the external competition for placement in the corps de ballet of the main company, nine female and nine male dancers were selected to become the first team of the Junior Ballet.  With not much procrastination and with the help from dedicated sponsors, a new company was created. In June of 2025, the company presented the results of its less than one-year existence through its first European tour that ended in mid-August of 2025. This captivating dynamic is becoming to the company of dancers, whose age spans from eighteen to twenty-three. After a year of training and gluing together as an ensemble, the European tour of the Junior Ballet became a veritable test for its dancers. In the tour, the Junior Ballet presented its first full-length program of four ballets. The first year of the Junior Ballet will go into the company’s history as a flamboyant and promising start.

 While being privileged to witness the performance of the Junior Ballet in the Royal Opera of Versailles in June, I would like to set my observations about its first program in the context of somewhat broader strategic goals and aspirations for the company. Although the practice of creating junior divisions affiliated with the major dance companies is widely spread around the world, the artistic profiles and functions of such companies differ. Moreover, some grand companies such as the Bolshoi or Mariinsky in Russia, or the Royal Ballet in London, comparable in statute with the Paris Opera Ballet, do not launch junior companies associated with their signature brands. In these cases, younger dancers are absorbed into the main companies through auditions and trained as professionals directly within productions.

The foundation of the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company in New York became inspirational as it demonstrated how a junior company might serve as a bridge between school training  and the professional world. More than two thirds of current dancers in the ABT began their dancing career in the ABT Studio. The very word “studio” carries a reference to experimentation, nourishing environment, and probation.  A studio grants both space and time to become an artist in many fields of art, but in dance the exigencies of training and artistic maturation are most demanding.
While ballet schools with their demonstrations, exams, and full performances prepare students rigorously for taking on their independent artistic careers, the challenges of integration into companies, adapting to their daily rhythms, and keeping the focus on the individual progression can often be overwhelming for young dancers. The abundance of ballet competitions, requiring both stamina and familiarity with the classical repertoire, though often superficially, does not prepare younger dancers efficiently to become part of the artistic collective, of the theatrical world’s schedules, or to adopt a professional approach to re-enacting different styles and embodying characters on stage. Dance companies are also subject to the vagaries of economic situations. Classical dance requires a long learning process and years of full immersion into practice. Many international schools train a remarkable number of students each year, yet only a few of them become artists dancing with companies, benefiting from a secure training process, creative environment, rich repertoire possibilities, and personal growth.

The goals of creating the Junior Ballet in Paris go well beyond the apparent function of a junior company linking the apprenticeship and professional worlds. Foremost, the company is charged with the twofold task of serving as a transmission platform for the French classical heritage and as a site for contemporary creations. Besides, the Junior Ballet must function as an outreach for newer and preferably younger publics and be engaged in generous touring across France and Europe, introducing the art of dance to wider audiences. This point of endowing the junior company with the role of the classical dance ambassador and a fresher perception of the diversifying world is both timely and socially responsive. Martinez, who leads both companies, considered the degrees of complementary between the main company, much venerated for its unshakable aura of the French tradition, and the junior company, which seeks a variety of young dancers from the School of the Paris Opera as well as from elsewhere.  
The idea that a smaller and younger company can function as an economical, touring herald for the main company and attract different groups of viewers corresponds to Martinez’s philosophy of making dance, and classical dance particularly, a vital asset of current cultural diversification. In the light of the ongoing debates on the proportions of traditions and innovations in cultural institutions, Martinez’s decision (though not single-handed) to invite into the Junior Ballet dancers from different schools, representing the global expansion of classical tradition, is equally promising. Among the first group of eighteen dancers engaged in the company in the season of 2024–25, ten dancers were trained either in the School of Dance of the Opera National de Paris or in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, while eight others received their training in ballet schools in Milan, Chicago, Boston, St. Petersburg, Seoul, Spain, and Australia (the spread of their nationalities is even greater). In the eyes of the Artistic Director, these differences in schooling combined with the sensitive training under the umbrella of the Junior Ballet can be turned into a strength in the future.

The first touring program of the Junior Ballet designed by José Martinez was representative of the philosophy of the company’s creation. The start is always a promise but also a vector of looking into the future. The program contained two parts and included four ballets. In the first part,  there were two ballets by twentieth-century iconic choreographers, namely George Balanchine’s Allegro Brilliante to Tchaikovsky’s Concerto for Piano #3, and Maurice Bejart’s Cantate 51 to Bach’s Cantate BWV 51;  the second part included  two ballets by contemporary neoclassical masters, such as Requiem For a Rose by Anabelle Lopez Ochoa to the music of Franz Schubert and Mi Favorita, composed by José Martinez to the music of Gaetano Donizetti. In both parts, the neoclassical language prevailed, however in the ballets by Bejart and Ochoa two leading female protagonists were given a non-classical stance with bare feet. The visual and conceptual links between the four pieces made for a continuous flow of visual impressions: in the fourteen minutes of his Allegro Brilliante, Balanchine composed his elegant balletic verses from the essential elements of classical vocabulary, Bejart seemed to be thinking about Balanchine’s poesis while picturing two female angels-companions to the archangel Gabriel; Ochoa’s allegory of love appeared as a carnal alter ego to the Virgin in Bejart’s reinterpretation of the Biblical Annunciation, and Martinez’s piece was a palimpsest of classical dance’s history, interpreted by the young dancers with the light, loving, and humorous touch. A convincing and unifying concept remains a strength of this first program along with its stylistic diversity and technical challenge.

A projected idea does not always come out in its absolute purity in the art of dance, or any other art to this matter. To dance Allegro Brilliante, for example, “correctly” is a hard task for any company. Mr. B himself notably said that not having any narrative idea for this work, he only wished to have the dancers to be able to complement the music the best they could. And this “best” is exigent, because the matter requires not only pristine execution of steps but also the musicality and the fluidity of movements that resides in dancers’ bodies and muscles. The musicality has an overwhelming effect of visual poetry in this and other ballets by Balanchine. Is it a single, fixed musicality, however?

In the two performances that I witnessed, the Balanchine ballet became a beautifully structured system of movements that were thoroughly learned by dancers, but their bodies “listened” to the music too carefully, not yet daring to sing it. Perhaps, the dancers cannot acquire the sense of this ballet’s musical synergy at once, but they performed it with eagerness and admiration for the steps. I cannot agree with those ballet connoisseurs who did not perceive “a pure” Balanchine in the Junior Ballet’s interpretation of Allegro Brilliante as if a single model for performing this or any ballet exists, or a young or more grown-up company can learn Balanchine’s or any other historical style without going through a chain of trails and errors in the process of appropriating it. Only dancing helps to understand a style and make it one’s own.

Following Balanchine's Allegro was the choreography by Maurice Béjart, created for his company Ballet du XXe siècle in 1966. For the dancers born in the twenty-first century, grasping the ideas behind Bèjart’s choreography made in the tumultuous 1960s, is an exercise in the history of styles by itself. If Béjart’s choreography does not pose much of a technical difficulty, the ballet’s Biblical reference to the Annunciation story engaging the archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary along with its anachronic mixture of the Baroque music, neoclassical ballet vocabulary, and the contemporary dance plasticity are not easy to seize, less make it convincing through interpretation. Perhaps, one must look not so much into hitting the exigencies (mythical again) of Béjart’s style but into these young dancers’ capacity to enliven this choreographic text. Here as well I felt that Cantata 51 was danced sincerely, somewhat straightforwardly, and with abundant joy, which might not have been against the idea of the maître himself.

The second part of the program showed a different side of the company. There, the dancers interpreted works of the choreographers of temporal proximity, who worked directly with them. It was a felicitous idea to invite the Belgium-Colombian choreographer Anabelle Lopez Ochoa to restage her ballet Requiem for a Rose for this young company. Oshoa’s ballet is about the transition between the blossom of romantic courting into a firm relationship or into a separation. It is about the passage of passions that leaves an ample space for projecting personal musings and feelings for dancers. Set to the music of Schubert, the nineteenth-century Romantic composer par excellence, the ballet allows dancers to plunge into the array of feelings, shades of doubts, and plethora of aspirations that are atemporal, relevant to any period or age. Yet, one should not forget that historical Romanticism was created by very young and impetuous artists. The power and sensuality of love was concretized in the figure of Venus who carried a rose clenched in her teeth, while the ensemble of twelve dancers, dressed in genderless skirts in layers of different shades of red, created a moving, plastic impressions of rose petals assembling and dissolving in different forms. 

Oshoa’s language is grounded in the neoclassical vocabulary with a plasmatic, rapid transformation of groupings, cinematic sequentially that is pleasant for the viewer to watch but too passing to stay in memory. The technical difficulty resided in creating continuity of movements and fluidity in changing directions, transformations of ensembles into soloists. The theme of love suggested by Oshoa seemed to resonate with dancers, though without any deep elegiac emotions, which the choreographer relegated to the music. The role of Venus stood in contrast to the ensemble clad in skirts: dressed in a nude bodice, the dancer expressed the passions of the goddess by means of contemporary movements with the speaking arms inspired by the flamenco dance. The Requiem for a Rose was like vision, ephemeral and fleeting, beautiful in process of blooming and dissipating thereafter.

Closing the first program of the Junior Ballet was Mi Favorita, a ballet-divertissement first created in 2003 and restaged by Martinez for his new company. The ballet is a jocose celebration of classical dance, with a playful take on its history, traditions, stage conventions, modes of display, and the vulnerable selves of the dancers. As a dancer, Martinez excelled in performing the classical repertoire; he was an elegant perfectionist whose technicality was tightly married to music. As a ballet master and an independent choreographer, he restaged the staples of the classical repertoire, such as Giselle, Le Corsaire, Don Quixote, among others.  In his versions of classical ballets, he respectfully put himself in dialogues with the old masters from Jules Perrault to Marius Petipa and Rudolf Nureyev. This deep knowledge of the craft inside and out gives him a different perspective: instilling the admiration for tradition among younger professionals and their public requires openness, critical eye, and boundless love for this art. The last component comes hand in hand with a good-natured humor and a light irony. Mi Favorita is an homage to the tradition seen in a playful, creative mode; it is a showcase for every dancer in the company, and a sign of synergy in progress between the dancers and their artistic director.

Oshoa’s language is grounded in the neoclassical vocabulary with a plasmatic, rapid transformation of groupings, cinematic sequentially that is pleasant for the viewer to watch but too passing to stay in memory. The technical difficulty resided in creating continuity of movements and fluidity in changing directions, transformations of
Perhaps not every humorous reference to the classics in Mi Favorita—and those were numerous—was clear to the non-connoisseurs but it did not matter by which route one could arrive at the original. What mattered, however, was that from the first vignette with the fifth position pointing to the epoch of Louis XIV to each individual variation or duet, the choreographer handed the public valuable insights into the codes and techniques of classical dance. Martinez never runs short of a variety of steps and combinations, hence there were no repetitions, no boredom in dancing elements. According to the conventions of balletic divertissement in the times of Petipa or Balanchine, the dancers become co-creators of the action, adding the spontaneity and their personalities to the choreographic text. The inventive costumes, particularly the versions of transparent and interchangeable tutus for female dancers created by Agnès Letestu, étoile of the Paris Opera ballet and the ballet mistress of the company, contributed greatly to the spirit of Mi Favorita. Filled with technical sophistication, Mi Favorita hit the energies of the young dancers to the enjoyment of the public.

Even though the first European tour of the Junior Ballet becomes a page in history it poses questions and offers insights for the future. How much could this company’s nascent repertoire contribute to the goals of building the links with the wider audiences, while making academic dance more responsive to the present? The company's first tour certainly proved the hunger of the public for a newer classical company in the places where dance is a staple of daily cultural agenda and in the venues rarely visited by major dance companies. 

Would two-years rotation span be sufficient for the dancers to acquire the necessary qualities to enter adult companies worldwide? Unquestionably, the Junior Ballet offers almost exclusive possibilities for daily training, professional advice, and medical support--all is essential for this demanding profession weaving human bodies, souls, and wills in one nod. With all the support comes enormous psychological pressure to succeed by means of securing a professional placement at the end of the company’s short tenure.  Three times per year the dancers of the Junior Ballet go through a professional assessment by the committee in charge and should be psychologically prepared for a “checklist” to follow. Even in such a nurturing environment the artistic outcome is not always predictable. 

The first group of dancers of the Junior Ballet was truly a fortuitous bunch of bright and talented individuals. I consciously avoid highlighting some names, while omitting others.  I am convinced that all eighteen dancers that performed the first program this summer have already proved themselves as artists capable of presenting a diverse and challenging repertoire with confidence and passion. A handful of them were already taken into the main company at the end of the first season, while six more new artists were added to the Junior Ballet.

The creation of a junior company affiliated with the Paris Opera Ballet is, inevitably, a remarkable event for the oldest classical dance company in the world and a contribution to the ongoing discussion about the present and future of classical dance globally.