Biography
Roland Petit (13 January 1924 – 10 July 2011) was a French dancer, choreographer, and ballet company director renowned for his innovative ballets. He trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School and gained recognition for his creative works.
Born in Villemomble near Paris to shoe designer Rose Repetto, Petit studied under Gustave Ricaux and Serge Lifar at the Paris Opéra Ballet School and joined the corps de ballet in 1940. He established the Ballets des Champs-Élysées in 1945 and the Ballets de Paris in 1948 at Théâtre Marigny, featuring Zizi Jeanmaire as the leading dancer.
Petit collaborated with artists such as Constant Lambert (Ballabile, 1950), Henri Dutilleux (Le Loup, 1953), Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint-Laurent, and César Baldaccini, and took part in various French and American films. In 1965, he returned to the Paris Opéra to stage Notre Dame de Paris with music by Maurice Jarre. He continued creating ballets for major theaters across France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, and Cuba.
His 1968 ballet Turangalîla stirred controversy at the Paris Opéra. In 1972, he founded the Ballet National de Marseille with "Pink Floyd Ballet" and led the company for 26 years. For his ballet sets, Petit often collaborated closely with painter Jean Carzou (1907–2000) and other artists, including Max Ernst.
Having created over 50 ballets spanning various genres, Petit choreographed for numerous celebrated international dancers. He eschewed mere technical showmanship, constantly reinventing his style and language, mastering pas de deux and narrative ballet, as well as succeeding in abstract ballets. Additionally, he worked with nouveaux réalistes such as Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely.
His 1946 work Le jeune homme et la mort ("The Young Man and Death"), with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, is regarded as his masterpiece and best-known ballet, notable for its strikingly modern choreography and costumes. In his 1949 ballet Carmen, Petit employed the en dedans technique innovatively, while his treatment of Turangalîla was non-figurative.
Petit contributed to several films, including appearing as a dancer in the 1942 short Symphonie en blanc by René Chanas and François Ardoin, choreographing the 1948 film Alice in Wonderland, The Glass Slipper (1954), Anything Goes (1956, among others), and serving as choreographer, writer, and dancer in Black Tights (1960).
In 1994, he received the Prix Benois de la Danse for choreography.
In 1954, Petit married dancer Zizi Jeanmaire, who featured in many of his works. His memoirs, titled J'ai dansé sur les flots ("I Danced on the Waves"), were published in 1993. The couple had one daughter, Valentine Petit, who is a dancer and actress.
Roland Petit passed away from leukemia in Geneva, Switzerland, at the age of 87 in 2011.
