Under the gentle radiance of golden chandeliers stood dancers, rows and rows of them, gleaming onstage. The scene was like a painting steeped in mist, its width diffused by shards of light and fog, its depth seeming to reach into infinity. The mood was dreamy as packs of dancers moved as one, filling the stage with the force of unison, or breaking away for solos, more meditative than flashy, yet each — and this was important — showing intent and individuality. Within each body, you felt dance history.
For this version of his dance “Apaches,” the choreographer Saïdo Lehlouh opened the Foyer de la Danse behind the stage at the Palais Garnier, the opera house that is a hallowed home for classical ballet. The foyer, a gilded salon where dancers warm up, is not a space the public usually sees.
“It’s kind of the background, the underground of the opera,” Lehlouh said. “I wanted to add it to the scene onstage. For me, there is no wall between the backstage and the stage itself.”
Breaking down walls, pushing past boundaries is what “Apaches” is all about. Created in 2018, the dance, named after the Parisian street gangs of the early 20th century, has had different iterations depending on the performance space (often outdoors) and the cast. “Apaches” is meant for all kinds of dancers and all types of movers: professional, untrained, people with disabilities. Lehlouh’s 8-year-old son wants to make an “Apaches” with kids. (“I can assist him if he wants,” Lehlouh said.)
At the Garnier, the performance mixed classical dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet with dancers from the National Choreographic Center of Rennes and Brittany, of which Lehlouh is a director as a part of the FAIR-E collective. (In French, the verb faire means “to do,” but the name also references the idea of being fair — in how the collective and its art meet the world.)
The dancers who work regularly with Lehlouh come from a variety of backgrounds — hip-hop, krump, electro, waacking and even flamenco. In bringing their skills to the Garnier stage, the production showed more than varieties of technical expertise: With so many dancers and dance forms on display, “Apaches” made a gorgeous statement about hierarchy in dance.
As it developed, the stage effect of infinity became both a visual tool and a desire for the future. What if all forms of dance — ballet, hip-hop, krump — were valued equally? What if they had the same resources? Along with the performance itself, this was the point of the Garnier “Apaches,” presented as part of the Cultural Olympiad, a program looking at the relationship between art and sport.
Set to a score by Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk, and washed in extraordinary lighting by Tom Visser, “Apaches” was both ephemeral and rooted in the here and now. Dancers improvised from the beginning to the end, but that wasn’t always apparent. The dance never lost its way. Lehlouh’s structure kept its life force moving.
Direct, purposeful walks across the stage swirled into circles or cyphers; in one breathtaking moment, three happened at once. Pauses in the action occurred, too, with the dancers, standing en masse. In these moments, the stage settled, filling the space with air.
There were sharp, striking solo moments, as when Mounia Nassangar, a waacking virtuoso, used her arms to slice the air with such razor precision and supple dexterity that you half expected her to lift off. A series of duets, Lehlouh’s homage to dance battles, emerged with subtle force. This was a statement, too. The Olympic Games will feature breaking as a competitive sport starting Friday, but here Lehlouh showed the artistry of battles, how they are conversations between dancers.
“I wanted to give back to the value of what is a battle, because a battle today has become really commercial,” Lehlouh said. “You say ‘hip- hop,’ and you imagine directly a battle. It’s become something like a tool for the culture.”
But a battle is how a dancer grows, learning how to deal with improvisation and with music that can’t be anticipated. “It’s how you react in the moment, and it’s a way of experiencing yourself in a total space of life,” Lehlouh said. “This is the first time in ‘Apaches’ that I put in a battle. I said to myself, I think the Opera Garnier is one of the best places to show the value of what is a battle for us.”
While working on “Apaches,” Lehlouh, who started out dancing hip-hop as a teenager, had the option of having more time to create it or for performances to be free. It was more important, he said, that the people he “grew up with in a suburb of Paris could have access to this kind of place.”
Two shows were booked in six hours. “We come from an environment where when you dance, our families cannot imagine that you can make a life through dance,” he continued. “It was also to give this possibility and say, Invite your parents and show them that you are an artist.”
