Roland Petit

Roland Petit was born in 1924 in Villemomble, near Paris. He entered the Paris Opera Ballet School in 1933 and became a member of the Corps de Ballet of the Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris in 1940. He presented his first choreographic works as early as 1942, and in 1943 he took his first leading role in Serge Lifar’s L’Amour sorcier. After leaving the Opera, he worked as a dancer and choreographer with Irène Lidova’s Soirées de la danse from 1944.

In 1945, he founded the Ballets des Champs-Elysées and created groundbreaking works for the company such as Les Forains, Le Rendez-vous, and Le Jeune homme et la mort. The latter was later taken over by the American Ballet Theatre. In 1948 he founded the Ballets de Paris, for which he created Carmen, Les Demoiselles de la nuit and La Croqueuse de diamants, among others. In 1950, he made Ballabile for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Between 1951 and 1955, he choreographed for Hollywood films such as Hans Christian Andersen, The Glass Slipper, Daddy Long Legs, and Anything Goes.

His long-term artistic partnership with his wife, the famous dancer Zizi Jeanmaire, was also significant. For her, he created numerous revues and shows, starting in 1957 with Zizi au music-hall at the Théâtre de l'Alhambra. In the 1960s to 1980s, he created works for renowned companies like the Ballet of the Paris Opera—such as Notre-Dame de Paris (1965)—the Teatro alla Scala, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Royal Ballet London and the Royal Danish Ballet.

In 1972, Roland Petit took over the direction of the Ballets de Marseille and choreographed such important works as L’Arlésienne, La Chauve-souris, Coppélia and The Nutcracker there. In 1981, his company was named “Ballet National de Marseille Roland Petit”. For this company, he created ballets such as Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Ma Pavlova, The Sleeping Beauty, Le Diable amoureux, Boléro, and Swan Lake and its Malefices.

In 1992, he founded the École nationale supérieure de danse de Marseille. In 1998, he stepped down from the direction of the Ballet National de Marseille and settled in Geneva, where he died in 2011.

Since then, leading companies around the world have performed ballets from his oeuvre of over 165 works, including the ballet of the Bolshoi Ballet, Mariinsky Theatre, La Scala, Paris Opera, Teatro Colón Buenos Aires, New National Theatre Tokyo as well as the San Francisco Ballet, Beijing National Ballet and Bavarian State Ballet.

Roland Petit's career has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Chevalier and Officier de la légion d'honneur and the Commandeur de l’ordre national du mérite.

A complete work by Roland Petit was first performed at the Vienna State Opera in 2009 with the premiere of Die Fledermaus. This was followed by his one-act L'Arlésienne (2012) and at ballet galas Le Jeune homme et la mort as well as excerpts from Carmen, Notre-Dame de Paris and Proust ou les intermittences du cœur.