Cinderella - Ballet - Season 18/19 Programming - Opéra national de Paris

  • Ballet

    Cinderella

    Rudolf Nureyev

    Opéra Bastille - from 27 November 2018 to 02 January 2019

    Tomasz Lazar / Société Rogues Artist Management Ltd / OnP

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Cinderella

Opéra Bastille - from 27 November 2018 to 02 January 2019

Ballet

Cinderella

Rudolf Nureyev

Opéra Bastille - from 27 November 2018 to 02 January 2019

2h50 with 2 intervals

  • Pre-opening night : 26 November 2018

    Opening night : 27 November 2018

  • Matinée Rêve d’enfants : 9 December 2018

About

In few words:

Charles Perrault’s celebrated tale, set to music by Sergei Prokofiev, is transposed to a film set. In a series of references to the heroes of the American cinema, Rudolf Nureyev propels his Cinderella under the spotlights of Hollywood. With a producer for fairy godmother and a star actor as Prince Charming, she escapes her miserable destiny and sees her dreams come true in a story not without similarities with that of the choreographer, the young Tartar who became an international star. With this “ballet‑metaphor”, the Company pays tribute to its former director Rudolf Nureyev. A great production that celebrates the opening of the Paris Opera’s anniversary year.

  • Opening
  • First part 40 mn
  • Intermission 20 mn
  • Second part 45 mn
  • Intermission 20 mn
  • Third part 40 mn
  • End

Performances

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Book your tickets today with the Season Pass

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Advantages

Full

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Audio clips

Cendrillon

Backstage

  • Stage memories: Valentine Colasante

    Video

    Stage memories: Valentine Colasante

  • Karl Paquette

    Video

    Karl Paquette

  • Podcast Cendrillon

    Podcast

    Podcast Cendrillon

  • Where Has the Magic Gone?

    Article

    Where Has the Magic Gone?

  • The Pumpkin Coach in Cinderella

    Article

    The Pumpkin Coach in Cinderella

Stage memories: Valentine Colasante

02:48’

Video

Stage memories: Valentine Colasante

Etoile talks to us about her Cinderella

By Octave

The video streams offered by the Paris Opera allow you to discover or rediscover some of the productions that have marked recent seasons. Alongside the videos, Octave invited a number of artists who participated in these productions to add their own personal touch. Willingly playing along, they agreed to film themselves at home in order to relate their experiences, share their memories of rehearsals and performances and discuss the technical and artistic challenges of their roles. They also explain how they continue their artistic activity during lockdown, whilst waiting to return to the stage and their public.

© Laurent Philippe / OnP

Karl Paquette

07:06’

Video

Karl Paquette

Étoile and star

By Octave

Named "danseur Étoile" in 2009, Karl Paquette bids farewell to the stage on December 31st. From Rothbart to Jean de Brienne, from Romeo to the Firebird, he has shone in all the major repertoire roles. For this, his last production, he chose the role of the Star Actor in Cendrillon, a generous and radiant character. Before the curtain rises, he shares his memories, feelings and plans for the future with Octave.

© Tomasz Lazar / Société Rogues Artist Management Ltd / OnP

Podcast Cendrillon

Podcast

Podcast Cendrillon

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" - by France Musique

07’

By Jean-Baptiste Urbain, France Musique

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" offers original incursions into the season thanks to broadcasts produced by France Musique and the Paris Opera. For each opera or ballet production, Nathalie Moller (opera) and Jean-Baptiste Urbain (dance), present the works and artists you are going to discover when you attend performances in our theatres.  

© Emilie Möri / Vozimage

Where Has the Magic Gone?

Article

Where Has the Magic Gone?

What Cinderella owes to Rossini and Nureyev

06’

By Simon Hatab, Cyril Pesenti

This winter, Cinderella parades her rags, coach and fairy godmother at the at Opéra Bastille, in Rudolf Nureyev’s Cendrillon, performed by the Paris Opera Ballet, and at the Palais Garnier in a revival of La Cenerentola by Rossini directed by Guillaume Gallienne. Two very different adaptations but which both so disrupt the world of Perrault’s tale as to turn it on its head. Octave provides an overview allowing you to recover your glass (velvet?) slipper. 

The French expression “vivre parmi les cendres” (to live among the cinders), as Bruno Bettelheim points out in his Psychanalyse des contes de fees (Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales), once meant “to occupy an inferior position within a family”. That perfectly sums up the miserable life of Cinderella, the orphan obliged to serve a harsh master and his two obnoxious daughters. Every evening, after a day of drudgery, it is by the fire, which one imagines to have gone out, that the poor child tries to glean a little comfort. In Charles Perrault’s tale (1697), it is magic that comes to her rescue, in the form of a good fairy, providing her with a dazzling change of fortunes as she rises from the condition of a servant to that of a princess. The recipe is the same in the 1950 Disney cartoon: with a wave of the magic wand, the pumpkin turns into a coach, the mice become horses and the lizards are transformed into coachmen amid a shower of twinkling stars.    

Spectators of Prokofiev’s ballet, Cinderella, choreographed by Rudolf Nureyev, and La Cenerentola, Rossini's opera directed by Guillaume Gallienne, will be surprised to find neither fairy godmother nor magic wand. Or so it would seem, for the magic has not disappeared: it has just taken on other attributes and – like the prince who can see beyond outward appearances to find the young girl with the glass slipper – those who take the trouble to stop and reflect will find ample recompense for their pains.

When Rossini composed La Cenerentola in 1817 to a libretto by Ferretti, the fairy godmother was replaced by Alidoro, the prince’s generous tutor. Neither pumpkin nor rats have any say in the matter. As for the glass (or is it fur?) slipper which has generated a celebrated controversy, it is replaced by a bracelet, in order, we are told, to avoid shocking 19th century audiences who could not have countenanced the denuding of the performer’s foot as she tried to slip it into the aforementioned slipper. Against all expectations, the story of Cinderella gets on very well without magic; its essence does not lie there, and Bettelheim confirmed that one should see that lavish display of special effects invented by Perrault as a form of irony intended to fool the more naïve of his readers. So be it. In fact, depriving opera of that sort of cardboard cut-out magic incites us above all to seek the real magic in the music. In Rossini, it is this that conveys Angelina’s gradual metamorphosis. Rossini’s heroine knows her classics – which gives her a certain advantage over her sisters – and she has certainly reread the fairy tale, perhaps in the Italian version by Giambattista Basile: during her first scene, the “Une volta c’era un re” that she sings to herself contains both the plot and its denouement:    

There once was a king
Who tired of being alone.
By dint of searching, at length he found,
But three women wished to marry him.
What did he do?
Disdaining wealth and beauty,
He threw in his lot
With innocence and goodness.

That says it all: ultimately Prince Ramiro prefers innocence and goodness to social prestige. But in this song, which takes the form of a tale, there is neither ornamentation nor floweriness: Angelina’s song is simple and plain. Later, Angelina’s voice takes on increasingly virtuoso and shining colours: at the end of the first act, Angelina finally envisages the possibility of going to the ball. Her vocal lines take wing. Her character acquires a certain grandeur. At the ball given by Don Ramiro, Cinderella appears transformed. Her voice now takes on a noble register, reserved in Rossini for characters of high rank. Hardly surprising that in these circumstances, nobody recognises her. Guillaume Gallienne also aims to transform the cinders into fire by imagining for the finale of Act I a volcanic eruption: the cinders that once seemed to condemn Angelina to misery become the very blaze of her anger. Caught up in a thoroughly Rossinian fire, Cinderella vents her fury almost to the point of collapse. After an act of forgiveness, her only vengeance, Cinderella celebrates her new-found happiness in a final display of vocal prowess. And if all this were but a dream?

Dreams also constitute the marrow of the Cendrillon choreographed by Nureyev, revived this season by the Paris Opera Ballet on the Bastille stage. Here, it is cinema that allows Cinderella – flanked by her alcoholic father and two actress sisters, mediocre extras with no future – to escape her condition, in the tradition of the well-known 20th century myth. In the wake of the crash of 1929 – Prokofiev composed his ballet between 1941 and 1944 – the great Hollywood dream factory provided a form of escapism during the Great Depression. In Nureyev’s ballet, Cinderella, finding herself by chance at the cinema studios, comes across Charlie Chaplin and King Kong before being spotted by a producer on the look-out for talent who casts her in her debut role in front of the cameras. Cinderella owes her success exclusively to her own virtuosity.

Although magic has disappeared, the themes of social advancement, of the passage from one world to another, are, on the other hand, firmly present and haunt this Cendrillon both in its music and its choreography. For Prokofiev, the forties meant the return to the USSR, after his American parenthesis – the composer had exiled himself in San Francisco in 1918 to escape the Russian Revolution. As Nureyev pointed out, “Prokofiev felt heavy nostalgia for the West. Cendrillon is not very Russian.”
As for Nureyev, coming from a modest background, he had followed a similar itinerary in leaving the USSR for France. One can easily imagine that he put much of himself in the character of Cinderella. In these exiles dictated by the vagaries of History, there is doubtless something extraordinary that far surpasses any form of magic.    

© Elena Bauer / OnP

The Pumpkin Coach in Cinderella

Article

The Pumpkin Coach in Cinderella

A production, a memory

02’

By Éric Moreau , Cyril Pesenti

Cinderella is back on the stage at Opera Bastille. In the ballet choreographed by Rudolf Nureyev with music by Sergei Prokofiev, the heroine of Charles Perrault’s tale is whisked off to a Hollywood film studio. Éric Moreau, assistant head of the props department of Opera Bastille, remembers one of the emblematic elements of the set, the Pumpkin Cadillac from Cinderella.   


“After having been in charge of production, in 2006 I was appointed assistant head of the props department at Opera Bastille. The story behind this set is quite extraordinary. Between the 2011 revival of the production and this one, the container in which the car had been stored had unfortunately got damp. I undertook a little investigation in order to restore the item to its original state. To begin with, we had to redo the upholstery of the seats which had deteriorated as a result of the damp. Water had soaked right in as far as the remote controlled motors, so we had to change them as well. We were faced with a problem, however: this set had been constructed by an outside company. By chance, I found their contact details, which allowed us to restore the famous car from Cinderella.

Its mechanism is rather intriguing. The exterior of the pumpkin car which, at first sight, looks like the fabric of a blow-up balloon, was in reality made from thick canvas sewn together and painted, the same as that used in fairgrounds for the construction of carousels! To get the right effect, everything is calculated to the nearest millimetre. There is an extra in the pumpkin when it is driven onto the stage. Beforehand, he has already started the first motor to pump up the pumpkin. At the moment the transformation is supposed to take place, he unfastens a strap to release the controls and presses a button and a second motor pumps up the car in barely 23 seconds! Finally, Cinderella gets into the Cadillac and sets off for the legendary studios of Hollywood!”   

© Elena Bauer / OnP
© Elena Bauer / OnP

Partners

  • Timepiece of the Paris Opera

  • Sponsor of the Paris Opera initiatives for young people and of the avant-premières

  • Sponsor of the Paris Opera's audiovisual broadcasts

Ce spectacle fait l’objet d’une captation réalisée par Isabelle Julien, coproduite par l’Opéra national de Paris, BelAir Média et Arte, avec le soutien du CNC et de la Fondation Orange, mécène des retransmissions audiovisuelles de l’Opéra national de Paris. Ce spectacle sera retransmis en léger différé sur Arte et Arte Concert le 31 décembre 2018 à 22h15.
Il sera également retransmis avec le concours de Fra Cinéma, dans les cinémas UGC, dans le cadre de leur saison « Viva l’Opéra ! », dans les cinémas CGR et dans des cinémas indépendants en France et dans le monde entier ultérieurement.

Media and technical partners

  • Coproducer

  • Coproducer and broadcaster

  • TV broadcaster

  • Cinema Broadcaster

  • Distributor TV international

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