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Femme étoile

After nearly twenty years at the helm of the Paris Opera Ballet, one of the great ballerinas is stepping down: Dorothée Gilbert

by Nicolas Vamvouklis

On 15 October, Dorothée Gilbert will step onto the Palais Garnier stage as Manon and take her leave from the Paris Opera Ballet. She chose Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography herself. Hugo Marchand will be Des Grieux beside her. There is symmetry in that decision. They found their connection in this production eleven years ago. Now it becomes the place where an arc closes.

What I find most compelling in her is finesse. Her line stays clear and her feet precise. The épaulement lends warmth to academic form. Virtuosity is there, but it rarely arrives with a demand for applause. She uses control to create a sense of grace. Each detail is purposeful, not decorative.

Presence at the Center
That quality was built by effort. She entered the school in 1995, then joined the company in 2000. She has spoken openly of not having ideal natural facility as a child. Instead, she compensated for physical limits. For her, technique matters because it eventually enables the performer to forget it. Once that foundation is secure, attention can shift toward the person she embodies. Her nomination as Étoile in 2007 reflected this philosophy. She had just danced Clara in Nureyev’s Casse-Noisette at Bastille during a technicians’ strike. Faced with that vast bare expanse, she had to conjure its world without the usual theatrical frame. She was promoted after the evening. It is a powerful emblem for her trajectory: structure stripped away, presence at the center.

The great heroines followed. Giselle revealed a delicacy that never became fragile, only increasingly exposed. Kitri carried attack. Odette-Odile brought a darker authority. As Tatiana in Onegin, emotional gravity emerged in restraint. Juliette allowed impulse to soften the clean architecture of her phrasing. Nikiya showed how fully she could embrace inherited language without suggesting a ‘museum piece’. Lise in La Fille mal gardée added playful wit to that immaculate classical vocabulary. Her repertory also included William Forsythe and Trisha Brown. Elsewhere, Mats Ek pushed the body into a radically new register.

Telling Stories
Storytelling remained her deepest terrain. Gilbert has said that she prefers works with a narrative and that music is essential to how she reaches dramatic truth. She does not merely illustrate a score. Rather, she lets it change the timing of an action or the pressure of an encounter. In such roles, craft recedes. Age has sharpened that instinct. Speaking of Manon late in her career, she described maturity as a process of removing things. A younger artist may need to prove an emotion. With experience comes the courage to trust almost nothing. I like that thought because it captures her style today so well. Expression now seems to pass through a glance or a held breath. Less is not emptiness. It is confidence.

Partnership has been equally important. With Marchand, there is an unusual ease. She has compared such rapport to an old couple who understand each other before words. In a pas de deux, that knowledge opens space. She can surrender weight because the support is certain. The chemistry is potent here, as tenderness can turn suddenly dangerous. The character is a fitting adieu. She is contradictory, yet hungry for life. She resists reducing her to a moral lesson. What interests her is the pull between love and pleasure. That complexity gives the ballerina room for a singular gift: making feeling visible without forcing it.

Her farewell is only to the Paris Opera, as her calendar already extends beyond the company with appearances scheduled abroad. She plans to freelance and pursue different artistic collaborations. Teaching and coaching are always possibilities.

The last curtain should not be read as a final exit. It marks the end of an extraordinary chapter. But the image I keep returning to is simple: Gilbert poised high on pointe in one of those remarkable balances, the moment suspended for a fraction longer than expected. She departs with her brilliance quieter now and entirely her own.

Returning to Palais Garnier as Manon on 1, 12 and 15 October.

Portrait at the top of the article:
© Matthew Brookes