Natalia Vodianova

meloni_xmy · October 19, 2014

Natalia Vodianova’s Grand Tour of the Paris Opera Ballet with New Director Benjamin Millepied

OCTOBER 18, 2014 2:30 PM

by HAMISH BOWLES photographed by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

On the eve of his ﬁrst season as director of the Paris Opera Ballet, Benjamin Millepied gives Natalia Vodianova a tour of his extravagant headquarters—and reveals his plans to infuse the company with new energy.

When Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to replace the rambling streets of his nation’s capital with arteries of wide, stately avenues, the centerpiece of the scheme—and its costliest building—was to be the Paris Opera House. Occupying more than 120,000 square feet and twelve stories (five of them belowground), this temple to opera and ballet was named for its architect, Charles Garnier. Chosen from among plans submitted by 171 architects, his heady Renaissance pastiche defined the embellished excesses of the Beaux Arts school. “What is this?” asked Napoleon’s empress, Eugénie, testily when she was shown the design (she was said to favor the architect Viollet-le-Duc). “It’s not a style; it’s neither Louis Quatorze nor Louis Quinze nor Louis Seize!”

“Why, madame,” Garnier responded artfully, “it’s Napoleon Trois!”

Although the Palais Garnier took fourteen years to build, and the emperor was long deposed by the time it opened in 1875, the recently installed Third Republic applauded it as a symbol of the lofty respect that the French reserve for their cultural patrimony. (Its unrestrained exuberance has been mimicked as far afield as Hanoi and Manaus, Brazil.) Now this storied institution is turning a new page with the arrival of the 37-year-old French dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied. As the newly appointed director of the Paris Opera Ballet, he joins a wave of glamorous young innovators heading up legendary arts companies, from Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Andris Nelsons at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

France takes its cultural life very seriously indeed. Sixteen hundred people are employed between the Garnier and its 1989 upstart, architect Carlos Ott’s Brutalist Opéra Bastille (there are 150 people in the costume workshops alone), and the French government subsidizes half of their €200 million annual running costs. This is a country, after all, where a new ballet production will make the television evening news. Small wonder that Millepied, who was born in Bordeaux but made his career in New York, admits that this is “really probably the only job that was going to bring me home.”

In many ways it was a surprise appointment—an internal promotion was expected—and Millepied has confessed that the very possibility initially made his “head spin.” He does have a history with the place, having created three ballets for the company (including Amoveo, with music by Philip Glass), but, he says, “I didn’t go to the school, so I’m essentially an outsider.” Daunted by the old-fashioned rigor of the French ballet school system, Millepied opted instead to train at the School of American Ballet in New York. He joined the corps de ballet of New York City Ballet in 1995, and, mentored by Jerome Robbins, rose swiftly through the ranks to become a soloist three years later, and a principal dancer in 2001. He retired from the company in 2011 to create the L.A. Dance Project with composer Nico Muhly and three others. “He was a lovely dancer, with a wonderful stage personality,” The New York Times’s Roslyn Sulcas tells me, “a wonderful partner, and something of a virtuoso himself. But I’m not sure he entirely fulfilled his promise as a dancer—he had many different kinds of focuses.”

As well as staging ballets by Robbins, Peter Martins, and Christopher Wheeldon, among others, Millepied has choreographed eighteen ballets for a wide range of companies, from ABT to the Dutch National Ballet. In 2010, he amplified his profile exponentially—and the reach of classical dance—when he choreographed the dance sequences and appeared as an exacting dance partner in Darren Aronofsky’s feverish ballet drama Black Swan, through which he met its star, Natalie Portman. The couple were soon romantically involved. They married in 2012 and have a three-year-old son, Aleph.

Millepied brings the positivity and can-do enthusiasm of two decades spent in the States to an establishment notorious for its bureaucracy. “He’ll be up against a lot of institutional crustiness,” observes Sulcas. “Things are done in a certain way because they’ve always been done that way. But he’s an incredibly talented director, fund-raiser, and people manager—he proved that early on with his entrepreneurial ventures. All of that bodes very well for Paris.” Millepied is also used to wearing many hats. He fondly remembers one heady evening when he danced with NYCB at the Opéra Bastille and then took a motorbike taxi to see his own ballet at the Palais Garnier. “It was amazing,” he remembers, “but it was scary because those motorbike drivers are totally insane.”

This summer, when I visited, Millepied had flown in from Los Angeles, where the family has been based; they have expressed excitement at the prospect of moving to Paris (with its strict privacy laws). At the time, however, Portman was in her native Israel, working on her directorial debut, an adaptation of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, so Millepied’s travel schedule was even more complex.

Millepied is here to audition nearly 200 applicants (20 or so from the Paris Opera Ballet’s own school) for eight places that have opened up in a company famed for the long-limbed elegance and poetic artistry of its dancers. “It’s a very painful process,” says Millepied, a dashing beauty himself. “Very hard. They all prepare variations and we watch them in class and onstage. They’ve probably waited a long time for this, so it’s a little bit intense. You have to think about their potential for growth—what that person could look like ten years from now.”

Millepied’s real debut will be the winter 2015 and 2016 season, with a giddying 170 performances and seven newly commissioned ballets. His own piece for the season (in a program with works by Robbins and Balanchine that are new to the house) is a collaboration with Muhly, Alber Elbaz, and the artist Philippe Parreno. One would expect no less from a choreographer who has worked with talents as far-ranging as the architect Santiago Calatrava and Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy. The Mulleavy sisters (who costumed Portman in Black Swan and dressed her for her wedding) are yearning to do Sleeping Beauty. “It’s their dream,” says Millepied. Watch this space.

Millepied is following in illustrious steps. Rudolf Nureyev’s boisterous directorship in the 1980s nurtured such stars as Sylvie Guillem and Isabelle Guérin. “It’s not a conservative audience at all,” says Millepied, who points out that his predecessor Brigitte Lefèvre, “has done such challenging programs here, and the audience is open to it. It’s Paris, so artistically I can do whatever I want. I can take risks!”

In the meantime, he has been getting his new house in order, installing sprung dance floors in the studios and nurturing in-house collaborators. “It’s very exciting for an organization that you hear is so tough to change,” he tells me. “But I found people who had a real desire to move forward. We have a lot to do, but I’m putting the bar as high as I can.”

He hopes to commission works by Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, and Justin Peck, and to raise the profiles of individual dancers. He’s also planning an annual fund-raiser. “Who isn’t going to want to come to a great dancing party at the Paris Opera?” he asks, pointing out an ornately decorated room backstage where pretty Degas ballerinas once congregated while gentlemen admirers ogled them from a concealed balcony above.

And despite the discovery of a family of mice living happily in his temporary offices, Millepied loves it here, because for all its overwhelming scale—and he hasn’t yet had time to explore the whole place—the building has an almost intimate charm. “There is a comforting feeling working here,” he says. “Ballet is pretty magical, but this setting makes it even more so.” For one thing, he discovered that the entire edifice rests on top of a man-made lake (Garnier expanded an existing tributary into an emergency water-pump system called le grand déluge).

Natalia Vodianova, who plays Millepied’s muse in this portfolio, was delighted to have the opportunity to make some discoveries of her own in the building, including the joyously colored, antic ceiling by Marc Chagall commissioned by André Malraux in the early sixties. Although she never danced herself, Natalia has happy memories of being taken to the ballet by her beloved grandmother in Russia. “I always loved and adored the ballet,” she remembers. “It’s the beauty, the finesse of the dancers, and the choreography—and the challenge of it.”

Finally she has been able to take to the ballet stage. “I felt like a princess or a character in some sort of fairy tale,” she says with a sigh. “It was an absolute dream.”

PHOTOGRAPHER: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

MODELS: NATALIA VODIANOVA & BENJAMIN MILLEPIED

STYLING: TONNE GOODMAN & MICHAEL PHILOUZE

HAIR: ORIBE

MAKE UP: STEPHANE MARAIS

HQ w/o text

http://www.vogue.com/2298381/natalia-vodianova-ballet-november-cover/

meloni_xmy · October 19, 2014

Pat McGrath Does Natalia Vodianova's Makeup with Her Eyes Closed

Sure, Pat McGrath may be the most influential makeup artist in the world but can she expertly pull off glitter winged eyeshadow on Natalia Vodianova . . . with her eyes closed? Director Arnaud Boutin imagines the scene in this Original Short.

video

http://video.vogue.com/watch/pat-mcgrath-does-natalia-vodianova-makeup-november-cover

kety · October 19, 2014

amazing!

Prisma · October 19, 2014

PHOTOGRAPHER: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

MODELS: NATALIA VODIANOVA & BENJAMIN MILLEPIED

STYLING: TONNE GOODMAN & MICHAEL PHILOUZE

HAIR: ORIBE

MAKE UP: STEPHANE MARAIS

HQ w/o text

7.jpg

1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg 4.jpg 5.jpg 6.jpg

http://www.vogue.com/2298381/natalia-vodianova-ballet-november-cover/

BEAUTIFUL. :wub2: :wub2: Everything is dreamy...the setting, the lighting and Natalia, of course. Annie Leibovitz is a genius! make%20it%20clap.gif Thansk for posting.

And Pat McGrath video is amazing too.

meloni_xmy · October 21, 2014

the opening of Fondation Louis Vuitton on October 20, 2014 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France

gettyimages

dailymail.co.uk

insta@suzymenkesvogue

twi@VDuponchelle

meloni_xmy · October 21, 2014

videos

http://videos.tf1.fr/infos/2014/hollande-salue-la-mannequin-natalia-vodianova-a-la-fondation-8505615.html

Edernez · October 21, 2014

Wonderful adds, meloni !

Natalia in Opera Garnier is just a dream comes true. She looks like so much a ballerina (or a princess). :wub:

meloni_xmy · October 21, 2014

yahoo

purepeople

HQ

LQ preview

newscom

meloni_xmy · October 21, 2014

The Paris Opera House Like You’ve Never Seen It Before: Behind the Scenes of Natalia Vodianova’s November Cover Shoot

Annie Leibovitz’s November cover shoot “Grand Entrance” offers up a once-in-a-lifetime look inside the palatial, more than 120,000-square-foot Paris Opera House. “For all its overwhelming scale,” writes Hamish Bowles of the historic Palais Garnier, “the building has an almost intimate charm.” And so, from the seats to the stage to the rooftop, here’s a behind-the-scenes look on-set with Natalia Vodianova and Benjamin Millepied.