A large number of you put questions to Marie-Agnès Gillot, and you have our warmest thanks. During this chat, the Étoile talked about her daily life at the Paris Opera, her vision of dance, her collaborations for the "3e Scène" and her work with the choreographers Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor. See what she said!

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Dance became my profession as soon as I joined the Ballet School. But it has remained a passion all the same – one that is as strong as ever. I just don't know where the years have gone. If I had to begin my career all over again, it'd be just the same for me. Otherwise there'd be no point in getting up in the morning. Dance is an art – or rather, a vocation. It can't just be a job.  

Marie-Agnès Gillot: It starts with a Ballet class in the morning. Then there's a 90-minute rehearsal, a pas de deux, etc., what we call a "service d’Étoile" – an "Etoile session" – on all the tricky parts. Then there are two three-hour rehearsals with the Corps de Ballet. If there is a show in the evening, we stop earlier, at 4.30. But at 6.30, we start warming up for the performance. After this chat, I'll take a half-hour nap, then it'll already be time to get made-up.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Yes, it still makes me just as excited as ever. I don't take it easy in class. At the moment, I'm not pushing myself, because I have a huge amount of shows and I have to conserve my energy. But my ballet skills are always up to standard, and I can do whatever I want. Ballet and contemporary dance feed each other. My training has always been based on Ballet; I've just added contemporary things. I've never become a "contemporary" dancer, and I've never abandoned the Ballet side. That's the most important aspect. It's also the hardest… Ballet is my raw material, my native language.  

Marie-Agnès Gillot: In Ballet, I'm somewhat limited by my physique to fairly stereotyped roles. I'll never dance Little Red Riding Hood (and that doesn't exist, anyway)! Luckily, contemporary dance has enabled me to do other roles. All the same, I like the idea that a body can express an attitude or a character. We all have a range of roles relating to the physique we are born with, rather than to our personalities or technique.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: If it's based on a book, I read the book – or the libretto if it's based on an opera. After that, everything depends on the nature of the part. I tend to only do dramatic roles. The ability to give breadth and dramatic power to a part is a talent you either have or you don't, and it can't really be explained. Some dancers become great dramatic performers; others don't.     

Marie-Agnès Gillot: I find contemporary dance more moving than ballet, because the parts involve more human reality, and the way real people interact. In ballet, everything is more codified: great performances are often linked to great energy, great technical skill and above all great musicality. Contemporary dance leaves more room for the actor.    

Marie-Agnès Gillot: I have as much enthusiasm as ever. But achieving perfection in ballet makes me just as excited as something new in contemporary dance.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: For some roles, yes; not all. Especially parts where you have to "die on stage" – the ones where you have to dig really deep into your physical resources. It's difficult to go on stage when you know you'll be going right through to that level of physical exhaustion. With Béjart's Boléro, for example, you know you're going to suffer. So it's more of a physical fear. Not to be able to bend any more – that's what really stresses me. Once you are on stage, you channel this stress. If you feel it's going to be evening like that, it helps to represent it mentally to yourself.    

Marie-Agnès Gillot: They are both very different. It's the first time I've worked with Wheeldon, while I have already worked four times with Wayne. Influenced? Yes, I'm glad to say! I'm a performer, so I'm there to be influenced – that's what I want. In front of those people, I am a performer, not a choreographer at all. So I've obviously been influenced by Wayne, but Christopher also has that gift.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Yes, I've already done some choreography, including Sous apparence at the Palais Garnier. Choreography takes up the time I have left! For many years now, it's been there all the time in my head. My free moments are always taken up with preparing something creative. At the moment, it's taking shape on a somewhat small scale. I don't know when this desire to choreograph began – when I was around 30, I think. But even when I was only four or five, I would dance in front of my parents, so I was already choreographing, in a way. It took me so much time to become an Étoile that I put it on the back burner. But once I had made it as an Étoile, I went back to it pretty soon.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: The ones who demand a lot from dancers. That's what enables us to grow. Dancers need to be fed. It's not their job to create the steps. Great choreographers like Carolyn Carlson, William Forsythe and Wayne McGregor require our constant input. It's a personal type of creation, but moulded by the choreographer. Many Ballet dancers don't like that – they feel lost. But I love feeling lost! You find yourself in a kind of state of nothingness, which makes you create things that come from your subconscious and your imagination, and that's really interesting. But if you come from ballet, you need time to adapt.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Wheeldon's Alice in Wonderland. Mats Ek's Carmen. Lots of others … I can't list them all!

Marie-Agnès Gillot: I can't imagine my future at all! I'm more of a grasshopper than an ant!

Marie-Agnès Gillot: That's a huge question! You need so many qualities… It's not enough to have the body of a dancer; you also need the head – and the musicality, of course. Perhaps it's best not to say too much in case it's discouraging…

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Yes, and I absolutely love it! I am an unusual case, because I learned dance from teachers who were relatively old. I felt I had jumped a generation. Now it's my generation who teach. I have the knowledge of my elders, plus everything I've learned during my career. It's very enriching to transmit all this to young people, because it makes you think about yourself, and it helps you to grow while helping them. The method I learned with is known as the French School. For my part, I combine what I learned as a child and as an adult, then serve it up to the youngsters, and they love it! I did a course with Violette Verdy. She really liked what I was doing. She even said I had gifts as a Ballet choreographer! I would really love to choreograph a ballet.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Sadly, there is no miracle recipe. What I have added to my preparation work is the plank. Normally people wouldn't do that, they'd swim, or cycle – indoors, of course. Adding the plank is the best way of stimulating and firming up the body before training.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: No. I still do cycling and planking, but only here, at the Opera.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: I have known Eric for a long time. He did the dramaturgy for Le Songe de Médée by Preljocaj, in 2004, I think. Since then he has become a friend. I stage-directed him at the Maison de la Poésie last year, in a choreographed reading: a new form I've invented. I love it when people tell me stories. The idea is to add scenes to a text, but without it becoming a play; it's still a reading. I found this an interesting idea. And I had such a good time doing that. For the 3^e Scène, he wanted to do exactly the opposite.

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Yes. I have even made a few steps in that direction. I did my first pieces at the Palais de Tokyo. There were seven of us from the Opera Ballet. I submitted four pieces, which were accepted. In France, they don't much like crossovers in art, but that's precisely what I love. 

Marie-Agnès Gillot: Mostly the upside. It's an art that inspires a respectful attitude from people. They don't clap you on the shoulder in the street! If someone recognises you in the metro, they'll say "I love what you do!" That's really nice.

On February 20^th,, after more than ten years as an Étoile (he was appointed in 2005), Benjamin Pech will bid farewell to the stage with an evening of dance including Tombe by Jérôme Bel, Les Variations Goldberg, In the Night by Jerome Robbins and an extract from Le Parc by Angelin Preljocaj which he will perform with Eleonora Abbagnato. Dominique Simonnet meets the artist before the final curtain.    

His gestures are fluid, his carriage princely and he has that extra something, a kind of magnetism characteristic of the dancer Étoile that immediately captures one’s attention. She, his partner, advances unsteadily on spindly legs, so frail, so fragile, bent beneath the weight of her 84 years. He takes her by the hand like a child, leads her on stage, lifts her delicately, twirls her round with care, risks a porté then returns to sit with her to among the spectators… For his farewell performance at the Opera, Benjamin Pech has chosen to perform this unusual pas de deux (imagined by Jérôme Bel) with Sylviane Milley. A regular ballet-goer for the last sixty years, Sylviane Milley has been waiting for him at the stage door after every performance … The artist with his greatest fan… A moving tribute to the public bringing a magnificent thirty-year career to a fitting end. Benjamin Pech still remembers life before dance when, a carefree small boy, he flew through Agde on his red bicycle. Sun, sea and blue skies … he could simply have spent his entire youth in this Mediterranean paradise but for one thing – ballet! Ballet was there, as if stalking its prey. “It was dance that found me,” he remembers. One day, instead of sitting quietly at the back of the jazz dance studio waiting for his mother’s class to finish, he decided to join in. When he began to contort himself, a cute little blondie amongst all those women, everyone was flabbergasted by his virtuosity. Already a virtuoso! The kid had talent and dance just snapped him up.

At twelve, there he was with a place at the Paris Opera Ballet School, alone in Paris, a full-time boarder, far from his family, far from the Mediterranean. Lessons every day, in every domain. The discipline of excellence is harsh. “ The hardest part was being separated from my family.” But in the world of dance, you grow up very quickly. “It was dance that raised me,” he says. Benjamin passed his ballet exams without incident and found himself in the Holy of Holies, the Ballet of the Paris Opera where he was soon to experience his first set-back: he failed to get promoted at his first internal exam. Disheartened, he made a few excursions into the outside world and entered a competition organised by the prima ballerina, Maïa Plissetskaïa. He was rewarded with first prize and renewed self-confidence. At the Opera, he rose in the ranks and at twenty-five he won his stripes as a Premier dancer. A soloist at last! Over the years, he spread his wings with elegance in both the classical and the contemporary repertoire, in ballets by Nureyev, Kylián, Preljocaj and Roland Petit. Fame was his, but time was slipping by and still the title “Étoile” eluded him. He considered going to New York City Ballet or to London, or creating his own company and touring privately whilst remaining at the Paris Opera. Then, during a performance in Shanghai in 2005, he stepped in to replace José Martinez who was injured, in the role of Frédéri in L’Arlésienne. He was outstanding. When the other star of the evening injured himself in his turn, Benjamin was ready to take over in the principal role in Giselle for what was to be a four-hour marathon performance. At the end of the evening, Brigitte Lefèvre made him an Étoile. At last! Eleven happy years were to follow with a wide and varied repertoire that brought him the admiration of fans like Sylviane, the old lady who was regularly transported by his performances, for the space of a few hours, into a brighter world and whom he gazes at now with infinite warmth, as if thanking all his spectators through her.    

Not easy I imagine to say good-bye to the Palais Garnier where you have performed so many roles…

Benjamin Pech: For me, the rupture occurred two years ago when I injured my hip quite badly. That was in fact my real adieu, and a brutal one, alas. But I wanted to carry on until I reached the age limit of 42. During the last two years, I’ve experimented with another way of dancing, performing character roles and I’ve had more time to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. When I became Benjamin Millepied’s assistant, I explored other paths like management, something I enjoy. I hope one day to run a company as artistic director.

Balanchine, Cranko, Forsythe, Kylián, Lacotte, MacMillan, Le Riche, Martinez, Neumeier, Nijinsky, Preljocaj, Ratmansky, Robbins – the list goes on! What a rich palette of roles!

B.P. : Yes, it is, isn’t it? I feel completely fulfilled! They have all been significant, these roles. I remember my first Giselle, in Brazil: in the mad scene, Elizabeth Maurin was transfigured, I thought she was genuinely going mad. She was no longer playing Giselle. She was Giselle. I lost the thread of my own character. And my first Swan Lake… Waiting in the wings, when I heard the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s music I said to myself: “This is amazing! Am I really about to dance this mythical ballet?” My most beautiful memories are often linked with music. Two years ago, in Le Parc by Angelin Preljocaj, my hip was so painful it brought tears to my eyes and then, I heard the first bars of Mozart and I just went for it. And Maurice Béjart’s The Firebird! I endlessly watched videos of Maïa Plissetskaïa interpreting the death of the Swan to try and capture her port de bras…

Not forgetting L’Arlésienne, of course, which along with Giselle, brought you the title of Étoile. That evening, in China, after your final leap into oblivion, there was a stunned silence. The audience was enraptured.

B.P.: I know every gesture of L’Arlésienne and every single note of music. For a dancer who likes theatricality, Roland Petit’s ballets are fascinating. I could talk about each of my roles for hours. I love them all, every one of them!

Classical ballet, contemporary dance… you have blurred the frontiers.

B.P.: Cyril Atanassoff once told me: “You are like me, you’re a demi-caractère, (i.e. not entirely classical, not entirely contemporary) and you’ll see, they make the best classical dancers.” There is, in effect, a kind of rupture in my body that creates a certain modernity. Take the prince in Swan Lake for example: one thinks of him as tall, willowy, blond and slender. I’m not like that at all and yet it was one of my finest roles. Ever since I was little, I have adored disguising myself and pretending to be someone else, probably in order to express through a character the things I couldn’t say myself. A dancer’s career is short and I was voracious. I would have loved to have stood one day on the table in Maurice Béjart’s Bolero and danced to the music of Ravel. It never happened, but it doesn’t matter.

Étoile is a rare and prestigious title… What does it mean for you?

B.P.: The title might make people smile but I’m attached to it. An Étoile is someone like Cyril Atanassoff, who just bursts with charisma, even when he’s not dancing. He has an aura, something that fills the space around him. We are the only company in the world to maintain this tradition and this structure: Quadrille, Coryphée, Sujet, Premier danseur and Étoile. Today, we could maybe do without the Coryphées but that’s all. The hierarchy is essential, it’s part of the dancer’s training. The annual internal exam, it’s our yearly bill of health. For my part, it stimulated me and allowed me to demonstrate facets of my personality that the ballet masters were unaware of.

An Étoile can only shine with his or her partner.

B.P.: Élisabeth Maurin really initiated me to the Nureyev ballets; she gave me the key to understanding them; she was the one who ‘made a man’ of me. And then, there was my own partner, my friend, Eleonora Abbagnato, with whom I have a bond that goes far beyond the limits of the stage. We understood each other instantly: I could always sense exactly what she was going to do next. We could even have a row, as we did one evening in the middle of the love scene in La Dame aux camellias, even though we were acting out the most torrid, the most devastating passion.

You have been dancing with the company now for more than twenty years and seen various directors and several generations of Étoiles come and go and witnessed numerous changes… How did you feel about these changes at the time?

B.P.: The Paris Opera is my home. I can only talk about it in superlatives. We had the same director for twenty years. Now we have to change and create a new generation of Étoiles. Benjamin Millepied undertook the task. He’s someone who adores choreography and is trying to create a kind of osmosis with visual art. But he only stayed a few months and you can’t form an opinion after such a short time. The Company, it’s true, needs to reinforce its classical vein. The dancers have to go to their classes every day and the repertoire needs to be programmed. Classical dance is cruel! The least imperfection shows up instantly. To remain at the peak of your form, you have to maintain it, just like a singer practising vocal exercises; you have to practise over and over again. Our ballet heritage is just as vital as innovation. You have to know where you’re coming from in order to move forward. Both are necessary.

Even if you give up performing, will you still need dance?

B.P. I need life. I’ve realised that to be a dancer, you have to concentrate on yourself all the time. It’s not egocentricity, we are obliged to focus on our bodies, our injuries, our nerves… Going on stage is sometimes very violent and it necessitates this preoccupation with self. Now I’ve had enough. I want to look after others instead. Like in Jérôme Bel’s Tombe, I’m no longer a man who dances but a man who walks and talks. I’ve got closure on my dancing career. It’s good-bye to the stage! There, it’s the final curtain… I’m making my adieux and I’m happy!    

Dominique Simonnet is writer, editor and former journalist with L’Express. He is the author of some twenty or so essays and novels. He has recently published Les Secrets de la Maison Blanche (Perrin, 2014) and Délivrez-vous du corps (Plon, 2013).

The Goldberg Variations, a ballet choreographed in 1971 by Jerome Robbins to the work of the same name by Johann Sebastian Bach, finally enters the repertoire of the Paris Opera. For the first time, the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, a renowned Bach specialist, will interpret the work, not in concert but for the ballet. Also for the first time, Laura Hecquet and Mathieu Ganio, Etoiles at the Paris Opera, will dance one of these variations. An encounter with these three performers.

With its opening and closing aria, thirty variations and over ninety minutes of music, this work by Johann Sebastian Bach is a challenge for the performer, - a gruelling experience for the pianist both physically and mentally. “It’s probably one of the longest pieces of solo instrumental music and requires total concentration” explains Simone Dinnerstein. “One has to think of every detail whilst still maintaining a vision of the whole.” For the dancers, the challenge lies elsewhere. When the curtain rises, the spectator is immediately drawn into the music, the steady rhythms gradually lulling the listener into a state of stillness, like the purring of a cat, and the dancer must therefore grab the attention of the audience, counteracting the effect of the rhythmic stability of the music.” Indeed, Jerome Robbins’s choreography exploits each variation as a separate entity, multiplying the choreographic sequences, which are performed by several different groups of dancers. Laura and Mathieu dance in the second part and execute a pas de deux on a rhythmically slow variation – a moment of suspended motion in the ballet, a parenthesis: “We had to create a particular atmosphere and establish it for just a few moments, like a bubble in the middle of the ballet, in contrast with what follows” recounts Mathieu Ganio. Laura Hecquet emphasises the importance of creating a rapport with Bach’s soothing, intimate music: “ It’s one of those moments when you mustn’t shatter the atmosphere - there must be nothing abrupt or precipitated - but still provide contrast with music that is calm and legato.”

Although the dancers are far from baffled by this music, they are conscious that it is slightly different: “We are used to dancing on music adapted to ballet with a score that includes adagios, variations, fouetté etc. Our movements are often defined by clearly identified moods and every movement creates a different colour. In this work by Bach, there is rather a single precise identity all the way through, which we are much less used to.

For Simone Dinnerstein, the parallel between the role of the pianist and the dancers' steps is obvious: “At times, Jerome Robbins’ choreography alternates different groups of dancers and one has the impression that the musical line has taken on a physical reality. When I’m playing, I sometimes watch the dancers and I’m struck by the fact that my hands are doing exactly the same thing as their bodies.”

For a moment, the three interpreters find themselves linked and dependent on each other in their quest for symbiosis, a kind of alchemy not always easy to achieve. As Simone Dinnerstein remarks, Jerome Robbins’ ballet requires particular tempi and changing them would endanger the performance of the dancers. However, “many of these tempi are very different from those I would normally adopt when playing this piece. I have had to learn to play it differently whilst remaining faithful to my own interpretation.” Ultimately, the pianist must sometimes lighten his touch and shorten the breathing places, in order to maintain regularity for the dancers. A new experience, prompting Mathieu Ganio to remark upon a certain paradox: “For pianists used to playing as soloists, it is difficult for them not to be swept along by their emotions. In a way, we stifle them so that we too can express ourselves. Of course, we are constantly listening.” The collaboration between the three is indeed based on listening and Mathieu and Laura are highly sensitive to the minute variations in Simone’s interpretation in order to “play genuinely with the music and almost dance with it.”

Simone Dinnerstein, Mathieu Ganio and Laura Hecquet were interviewed by Solène Souriau