sbet A Ballet Opening in Paris Offers a Mix of Debuts and Returns

For Johan Ingersbet, making his choreographic debut at the Paris Opera Ballet is to return to the grit and glamour that he remembers of the Palais Garnier. He danced in the palace of opera and ballet in 1995 (“Or was it 1996?” he asked in a recent interview) as an ensemble member of the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague.

Inger returns to open the 2024-25 Paris Opera Ballet season on Friday with his piece “IMPASSE,” alongside two dances by the American choreographer William Forsythe. The program, running 13 sold-out performances through Nov. 7, also includes the Paris debut of “Rearray,” Forsythe’s 2011 duet, which is being reworked as a trio, and the return of his “Blake Works I,” which debuted at the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016 to great acclaim.

But Inger’s return to the Palais Garnier is a personal journey to what he considers to be one of the world’s great performing spaces.

“It’s like a temple,” Inger, who was born in Sweden, said by phone from his home in Seville, Spain. “There is something mystic and magnetic about it.”

And that magnetism extends beyond the building itself, he said, because of the quality of what the Paris Opera Ballet offers to a contemporary choreographer.

“From my perspective, the Paris Opera Ballet has dancers who are more developed and can do classical ballet and meet the challenge of contemporary dance,” he said. “Often some dancers are a bit more fragile on the contemporary side.”

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