Aurélie Dupont, a principal ballerina for the Paris Opera, will step down from the starring role next month at the age of 42 after performing L’Histoire de Manon, which will be shown in hundreds of cinemas across Europe and North America, reports The Guardian.
With an emotional smile, Dupont said on Wednesday that she was moving on after 32 years – 17 of them as principal dancer – to become the Opera’s ballet mistress, teaching the company’s classes and running the dancers through their rehearsals.
Her final Paris Opera performance as principal on May 18th will be beamed live to 350 cinemas across Europe. The recorded version will later be shown in some 100 cinemas in the US and Canada.
She said she also planned to keep dancing, though “more in contemporary creations”.
Benjamin Millepied, director of dance at the Paris Opera – and also the husband of the actor Natalie Portman, whom he choreographed in the film Black Swan – called Dupont “the best of the Paris Opera’s dance school”.
The retiring star, he said, had embodied “musicality, elegance, acting talent” as one of the 18 principal dancers in the Paris Opera’s 154-strong company.
Dupont said one of the things she would be sure to impart to the dancers when she became ballet mistress would be that, “by wanting to do things well technically, we sometimes forget that this is a show, a pleasure”.
She herself learnt that lesson late, Dupont said, recalling that the late German modern dance director Pina Bausch had once told her that she was “a bit of a ‘warrior’ – I didn’t take any pleasure” in dancing, only striving for technical perfection.