The Paris Opera Ballet concluded its season on July 14, during the third heat wave of the summer. La Bayadère, one of the enduring classics of the nineteenth-century ballet repertoire, received twenty performances, each playing to full houses. The dramatic story, together with Petipa's incomparable "white act," in which the Shades of the afterlife appear to Ludwig Minkus's lyrical score, creates an unforgettable theatrical experience that no recent sensitivities to the colonial flavor of its theme could tarnish. Turning to the history of La Bayadèrereveals that what we call a "classical" ballet is itself the product of successive reinterpretations, each shaped by the aesthetic and political circumstances of its own time.

With his 1992 staging of La Bayadère, Rudolf Nureyev cemented one of the defining aspects of his artistic legacy that of restoring Marius Petipa's masterpieces to the core repertoire of one of the world's leading ballet companies. The opening night of the performance on October 8, 1992, became a tribute to the legendary dancer and his service to the Paris Opera. On that night, the public bowed in admiration to Nureyev who pushed the company to a new level of excellence and whose frail appearance that evening left his admirers with little hope. Nureyev had only three more months to live then. With the cinematic sets of Ezio Frigerio and striking costumes of Franca Squarciapino, La Bayadère became a signature production of the Paris Opera Ballet, taking its rightful place alongside other ballets from the treasury of the Mariinsky tradition restaged by Nureyev in Paris. 

Set in the fabulous world of a once-upon-a-time Hindu principality, the ballet narrates a story of love, betrayal, power, and vengeance. Marching to the drumbeat of his epoch, Marius Petipa created his first version of the ballet in 1877, at the peak of the nineteenth-century craze of Orientalism. The image of bayadère, a servant of the temple performing ritual dances (a devadasi in Sanskrit) a term that entered European languages in the Portugese version as “bailhadera,”) appeared on the European stage since the late eighteenth century. Petipa, far from any research on the Hindu tradition, sought to create a grandiose visual tableau worthy of his regal patrons in Russia. The looming presence of Verdi’s Aida, staged in Russia in the Mariinsky in 1875, and for which Petipa had choreographed dancing scenes, was reflected in the four-act structure of La Bayadère, the sumptuous court procession of the second act, and the rivalry of two female characters over the love of the handsome warrior. The third act, The Kingdom of Shades, demonstrated Petipa’s demonstrated Petipa's intuitive instinct for pure balletic action in which dance speaks in its own phantasmatic orthography. 

While the first two acts present the earthly side of the story, in which Solor, a top officer in the service of the Rajah, pledges his love to Nikyia, the temple dancer, on the sacred fire. This love is doomed from the outset because the lovers are members of different social castes, but also because the Rajah wants to marry Solor to princess Gamzatti, his daughter. The Grand Brahmin who is besotted with Nikyia betrays Solor’s and Nikyia’s feelings to the Rajah. The religious and secular authorities agree on forcing the socially proper marriage between the princess and the warrior, which leads to the elimination of Nikyia, a member of a lower cast, who is fatally bitten by a snake hidden in a basket of flowers. Solor, who has sworn his love on the sacred fire, Gamzatti who eliminates Nikyia, the Rajah and the Brahman are all individually responsible for the death of the temple dancer. So far, it reads as a sentimental plot in which all sympathies lie with Nikiya.  Then comes the third act that brings a new twist to the story, and to the history of ballet at once.

In the third act, the remorseful Solor, grieved by the death of his beloved, seeks solace in opium. Under the influence of opium, Solor is granted a vision of his beloved and seeks her forgiveness. In this vision, presented as if seen through the optical device of a smoky filter, a chain of depersonalized female figures (sixty-four in the 1877 version), descends one by one from an elevated structure upstage in a synchronized chain of steps accompanied by delirious music for about a dozen minutes. The dancers, all enveloped in white tutus and transparent scarves attached to their headpieces, appear as a poetic indolence and a mechanical multiplication of the perished Nikiya. Inspired by the image of hovering angels that Petipa saw in the Bible illustrated by the French artist Gustave Doré, the choreographer creates a proto-cinematic vision of the supernatural. The Descend of The Shades turns the materiality of the dancers’ bodies into a continuous moving picture created by fluttering, monochromatic images of dancers in arabesques drawn in light.  When performed to perfection, the scene makes the public gasp. Its concept and composition are rightly considered as Petipa’s masterpiece that became known to the public outside Russia only when the Soviet companies started touring the West. In the third act, Nureyev stayed essentially close to the version that he himself danced in Leningrad, and that preserved what had survived from the Petipa epoch. 

Recent scholarship on Petipa's ballets has shed new light on the evolution and successive stage transformations of La Bayadère, a process that had already begun with Petipa's own revivals of the ballet. Although the designation “after Petipa” is rightly attached to Rudolf Nureyev’s staging of La Bayadère at the Paris Opera, it is worth recalling that Nureyev’s artistic visions and memories of this ballet had already passed through the thick optics of history. The La Bayadère known to Nureyev was already a Soviet reinterpretation of Petipa's grand ballet, staged by Vakhtang Chabukiani and Vladimir Ponomarev in 1941. 

Vakhtang Chabukiani, then a thirty-one-year-old virtuoso dancer, highlighted the ballet’s principal male role both technically and dramaturgically. Vladimir Ponomarev, fifteen years older than Chabukiani, had danced at the Mariinsky theater since 1910 and knew the style of the late Petipa’s ballets by heart. He helped adapt Petipa’s choreographic language to the new technical capacities of dancers trained in the Soviet Union. Since the 1920s, academic dance became increasingly athletic and dynamic. Dancing episodes gradually moved the pantomime scenes to the side. The 1941 version skillfully wove together dance and dramatic action. The Soviet state, the only sponsor of classical arts in the Soviet Union, stipulated that art production should not contradict socialist ideology.  La Bayadère with its exotic story might have been erased from the repertoire of the Kirov ballet completely. Yet the necessity of keeping the classical repertoire prevailed. Chabukiani and Ponomarev’s version eluded the constraints of the Stalinist state and La Bayadère acquired new significance as part of the nation’s cultural heritage that that the Kirov Ballet was entrusted with preserving. The revised La Bayadèreappeared in the repertoire in June 1941, just weeks before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

The Kirov version of 1941 crystallized the three-act structure of the ballet, ending with the vision of the shades and dispensing with the no less visually thrilling fourth act. In the finale of the third act, Nikiya freezes in an attitude pose with her index finger pointing up. This gesture is not accidental, for it invokes the divine forces above to deliver justice. In the last, forth act of La Bayadère, the earthquake strikes the palace of Raja during the nuptial festivities. Everything and everyone had to be destroyed but the warrior who was saved by Nikyia from the rubble. The act of the punishment was realized by means of machinery and revolving sets, reminding Karl Brullov’s epic tableau The Last Day of Pompeii that was hung only a few blocks from the Mariinsky Theatre in the Museum of Alexander III. 

The theatre legends tell that the original sets for the fourth act perished in the flood of the Neva that reached one of the theatre storages in 1922. No one cared about the restoration of the sets as the old stage machinery in the (now) Kirov theatre became obsolete as well. The explanation has always seemed rather doubtful because the ballet The Bronze Horseman choreographed by Rostislav Zakharov in 1949 to the music of Reinhold Glière had the flooding scene based on the similar machinery and painted sets, as it was in the case of the earthquake in La Bayadère. Nothing was impossible for the socialist theatre. More probably, the dramaturgical incompleteness of La Bayadère ending in the abstract third act seemed more logical for the emerging neoclassical aesthetics of dance, while it served well to the Kirov ballet’s mission of preserving the classical tradition. Audience too seemed satisfied with Nikyia’s forgiveness happening in the luminous world of dreams with no return to the earthly affairs.
Chabukiani and Ponomarev did not completely abandon the fourth act but but transferred several dances from it to Act two. In recent decades the fourth act has reappeared in full versions of the ballet, including those by Natalia Makarova, Yuri Grigorovich, Sergei Vikharev, and Alexei Ratmansky. In the meantime, the three-act structure of the ballet became canonical, as it demonstrated how the nineteenth-century ballet that combined a naïve plot with colorful ethnic dances had already anticipated the aesthetics of an abstract “white ballet” with its distinctive formal organization. The Kingdom of Shades, a hallucinatory vision caused by opium, remained a preserved pinnacle of Petipa’s heritage and a linchpin of the repertoire exported to the West by Soviet ballet companies from the late 1950s onwards. The poignant academism of The Kingdom of Shades of the Kirov Ballet, along with its Swan Lake, became an exemplary staging that Russian ballet guarded for posterity.

Liberated from any specific ideological underpinning, the Kingdom of Shades—a monochromatic hallucination in motion—featured prominently in the repertoire presented in Paris and London during the Kirov’s 1961 tour of Europe. The twenty -three-year-old Nureyev shone especially bright in the third act of this ballet at the Palais Garnier on May 19, 1961. His appearance in the Grand Pas showcased new elegance and power in male dancing, completing the lyrical ambiance created by evanescent figures of bayadères in white tutus. The supernatural beauty of the third act, the virtuosity of Nureyev and his stage partner Olga Moiseeva, along with the magnificent corps de ballet, left audiences in awe that day. Nureyev considered the third act of Petipa’s La Bayadère a masterpiece, raising dance to the level of the sublime. 
La Bayadère would prove to be the last ballet staged by Rudolf Nureyev for the Paris Opera. Choreographing and directing a production of this scale required a supernatural effort for the terminally ill dancer. To stay true to the choreography, Nureyev asked Ninel Kurgapkina, the prima ballerina of the Kirov, to join his French team of coaches. Kurgapkina, Nureyev’s trusted friend and artistic partner, remarked in her interviews that he strove to stay very close to the version that they both had danced in Leningrad, while introducing more technically demanding male solos and changing some details in the ballerinas’ variations. In her recollections, Kurgapkina, who lived in Nureyev’s apartment on the Quai Voltaire while working on La Bayadère, also remarked that Nureyev had never truly left Petersburg-Leningrad, continually recreating from his memory ballets he had danced while there. 

Staging the Petipa repertoire for the Palais Garnier—and many other theatres around the world—became a leitmotif of Nureyev’s life. The continuity of tradition was his ultimate modus vivendi, as he acknowledged the stage as only one true homeland. In La Bayadère, the theme of death is explicit, though, for the dying Nureyev, staging a ballet about death was itself a way of remaining alive. Even as his health deteriorated to the degree that he could no longer dance himself, he wished to continue living through dance in whatever way remained possible. Learning the difficult craft of musical conducting was also a way to approach dance. Nureyev escaped the implacable fear of ageing that plagues any dancer by continually setting himself new goals. He did not wish to retire. Perhaps he had heard that Petipa, after being dismissed from his leading position at the Imperial Theatre in 1903, became an embittered old man who suspected everyone, even his own children, of disloyalty. Perhaps that was the deepest lesson Nureyev drew from Petipa's theatre. Dance is a sort of death-defeating delirium, as the “white acts” in the old ballets about death powerfully demonstrate.

La Bayadère of 1992 was an act of reconciliation with Nureyev’s past and his precarious present. His Nikyia dies dancing and loving. For Nureyev, the finale also became a gesture of poetic redemption. With La Bayadère, he accomplished his mission of bringing yet another of Petipa's masterpieces to the French public. The Paris Opera production acquired an even greater visual opulence in its majestic, perhaps at times even excessive sets, yet it preserved the distinct lyricism of the “Soviet” third act.

With the staging of La Bayadère, Nureyev forged his last cohort of étoiles—including, among others, Laurent Hillaire, Isabelle Guérin, Elizabeth Platel, Nicolas le Riche, and Winfred Romoli—who continue to carry his torch of love for dance. The ballet allowed Nureyev to work again from his memories: those of Leningrad, of the Mariinsky and its tradition, of his teachers, of his controlling directors and pestering administrators, and of his beloved colleagues. Perhaps, these also included the memories of his dancing the role of Solor in front of his parents, who had traveled a long way by train from Ufa to Leningrad in October 1959 to see their son on the fabled stage of the Kirov, however unsentimental about his Soviet past Nureyev might have appeared in interviews. That living inheritance of Nureyev’s works depends on each new generation of dancers, who must transform memory into presence every time the curtain rises.

The dancers of the new generation of the Paris Opera Ballet carried this rich historical legacy with excitement and generosity. Above all, La Bayadère highlights the corps de ballet of the company. Petipa excelled in creating a dazzling variety of group and solo dances for the act of betrothal. Nureyev preserved most of them, including the dances with ribbons, parrots, the fiery Indian dance, the playful Manu dance, and the solo of the Golden Deity, which was added to the 1941 production by Nikolai Zubkovsky. The third act, in which the female corps de ballet plays a crucial role, was performed to perfection every time. While the audience clasps in awe to the beauty of this scene, I never stop thinking about the work of the formidable ballet masters of the Paris Opera who train the dancers to deliver this difficult piece in such unified, poetic manner.

Seeing two casts in the principal roles proved especially rewarding as it showed so clearly many layers of artistic expressivity contained within the ballet's seemingly schematic plot. In the first performance, the triangle of Nikyia/Solor/Gamzatti was danced by Sae Eun Park, Paul Marque, both étoiles, and Inès McIntos, Premiere danseuse of the company. Sae Eun Park and Paul Marque were impeccable technically, perhaps a little too impeccable to stir any strong emotions from the public. In contrast, Inès McIntosh, a dancer whose growth is thrilling to observe, made the role of Gamzatti so distinct and emotionally resonant that the story got enriched by the young princess who was not only an instrument in her father’s will, but a truly confident heiress to his house, not to mention McIntosh’s fearless technique.

I was fortunate enough to see another cast proving that La Bayadère is a rich terrain for creating characters, depicting changing emotional states, and thus making dance an art capable of expressing emotions rather than merely pleasing the eye. Héloïse Bourdon, whose singing body was made for dancing Nikiya, and Germain Louvet in the role of Solor filled their scenes together with rich palette of sensations while their pas de deux—in the first and third acts—became truly poetic. The only way to keep the academic dance going, in my view, is to reveal poetic power of its forms by presenting feelings that go beyond words, filling the movements with meaning. Bourdon and Louvet are not shy to bring their personalities to the stage. This is the true work of the artist that can be achieves not only in the studio but also through the artist’s individual research of the character. Bourdon created a powerful Nikiya willing to protect her love and dignity by pointing her finger to her persecutors. Her strong technique is not the end but a means to infuse the character with emotions and inner life. She is also a true priestess of the temple, whose sensuality is linked to mysteries of her gods, her faith in them, and her earthly grace. There is not a trace of meekness or subjugation in her Nikiya.

Louvet now strikes a perfect balance in presenting an aristocratic warrior from a mythical world and a contemporary intellectual who believes that his personal errors could always be corrected or explained away, until he really loses what he loves. Recently promoted to Premiere danseuse Clara Mousseigne in the role of Gamzatti added to this duo of more experienced dancers her charming innocence of a spoiled child who gets what she wants and a beautifully performed pas de deux with Solor, in which Mousseigne demonstrated a plasticity of jumps, naturally spiraling pirouettes, and her sensation of form in poses.

Nureyev’s plot worked, I said to myself in the end of the season. La Bayadère of June 2026 in Paris Opera Ballet looked as fresh and thrilling as it probably looked in February 1877, when Petipa showed his new ballet to the public in Petersburg. Ekaterina Vazem, who created the role of Nikiya then, wrote in her perceptive recollections that “of all the ballets which I had occasion to create, this was my favorite.” It remains the favorite for dancers and public alike. Nearly a century and a half after its première, La Bayadère continues to remind us that ballet survives not simply through choreography fixed once and for all but through the continual multiplication of embodied memories, those carried in dancers' bodies, transmitted by teachers, renewed by each generation, and ultimately entrusted to its audiences.