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Live streaming Nicolas Le Riche farewell


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The Opera de Paris has now confirmed that star Nicolas Le Riche's farewell performance will be live streamed worldwide on
www.operadeparis.fr

Wednesday 9 July 2014 à 19h30 (330 pm Eastern time)***** [Admin note: please see two posts below]
Program: Les Forains (Roland Petit),
Excerpts from:
Bal des cadets (David Lichine)
Raymonda (Rudolf Noureev),
Caligula (Nicolas Le Riche),
pas de deux from Appartement (Mats Ek)
LAprès-midi dun faune (Vaslav Nijinski),
Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (Roland Petit),
Boléro (Maurice Béjart).

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solo by Nicolas Le Riche with Matthieu Chedid

Petit: Les Forains (entrance of the players) - Le Riche and pupils of the Paris Opera Ballet School
Lichine: Graduation Ball (drummer boy's solo) - POBS student Francesco (I didn't hear Le Riche give his surname.)

Nureyev:
Raymonda (entrée de jongleurs and part of the second-act finale) - Stéphane Bullion (Abderam) & Dorothée Gilbert (Raymonda)
Nijinsky: L'Après-midi d'un faune - Jérémie Bélingard & Eve Grinsztajn

Petit: La Jeune homme et la Mort - Le Riche & Eleonora Abbagnato

Le Riche: Caligula (Incitatus & Caligula) - Audric Bezard & Mathieu Ganio
Béjart: Boléro - Le Riche, Josua Hoffalt & Karl Paquette

The 'door' duet from Mats Ek's Apartment, which presumably Le Riche was to have danced with Sylvie Guillem, didn't materialize, though as canbelto noted, Guillem did come out for the bows at the end.

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I missed the first two pieces on the program*, because the feed froze, but I did get to see it from the "Raymonda" excerpt on. I don't understand more than a smattering of words in French, so I'm not sure who was dancing most of what I saw, aside from Le Riche.

*Edited to add: three. I was posting at the same time as volcanohunter, and the solo with Chedid singing wasn't listed on the website. I'm especially sorry I missed him with the students.

I'm not sure what Guillem and Chedid did -- I only saw them during the curtain calls, and she was wearing a big, loose bright yellow shirt over those tights -- but Guillaume Gallienne read a poem about Le Riche, which had the audience laughing. (If you have a chance to see Gallienne's "Me, Myself, and Mum" (or "Les garçons et Guillaume, à table!" the original French title, I'd highly recommend it.)

"Bolero" has to be the most fun spectacle with which to end a gala. It gave a chance for the men in the company to honor him dancing rather than being bystanders. So many of them looked familiar, but the one I could definitely ID was Karl Paquette, one of the first men to join in and later one of his curtain call wingmen.

There were a bazillion curtain calls on stage, in front of the curtain, with the company in the wings clapping along throughout the long ovation during his solo bows on stage. There was a fluttering of shiny confetti. Someone managed to get a paper-wrapped bouquet to the stage, which he held until the end. His partner/wife (I'm guessing) brought his (their) two daughters to greet him during one of the later calls and then went to the side (or offstage).

I want the DVD! "Jeune homme et la mort" and "Bolero" were great!

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For me the really odd thing was Guillem's willingness to stand front and center during all those curtain calls, even though she hadn't performed, while Clairemarie Osta--Le Riche's wife--appeared just long enough to lead their daughters out on stage, and then promptly disappeared back into the wings.

Fortunately a DVD of Le Riche's Jeune homme already exists, and one of the absent Apartment, too. Le Riche had already been filmed in Raymonda, Faune and Bolero, but those are sitting in the vaults of French television, which is most frustrating.

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Wonderful. Nicolas Le Riche went out with that same class he has so long graced us all with .... and a huge helping of that savoir faire that has always been hallmark to his uniquely generous state of play. We will not see his particular like again. Merci beaucoup.

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Most dance and classical music streams on Arte are left up for six months. Some are available for a full year, but others for three months, a few weeks or even a few days. The previous version of the site was helpful enough to say precisely how long that would be. It's probably better to watch the program sooner rather than later.

The second intermission did strike me as excessively long. I'm sorry if Guillem's eccentricity was what put the damper on this live-stream enterprise. Now that the performance has actually taken place, I wonder whether she'll allow the duet to be re-inserted. innocent.gif

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Am I getting this right that the solo was Le Riche doing a "Greatest Hits" memory track? The director cut out of an "Apollo" bit with a needless shot of Chedid while Le Riche was mid-air, and I think he ended with "Dances at a Gathering."

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That's probably what it was. When Jacques d'Amboise was getting his Kennedy Center Honor, his kids did a dance that had Apollo, Union Jack and Who Cares? references. Most of them were probably lost on the audience.

I noticed that Le Riche also paid tribute to the Nureyev rond de jambe fetish.

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From today's Links in the NYT, Sulcas writes:

Although, like most of the Opera dancers, he has eschewed a high-profile, company-hopping career, his virtuosity, charisma and onstage intensity have made him a superstar here, and the troupe’s best-known dancer abroad. He has also been a relentlessly curious artist, taking on projects outside the Opera, working with Sylvie Guillem, and performing with his own small group of dancers, making him a name familiar to audiences beyond the Garnier.

Have there been any reports in the French media that he will continue to dance in projects and/or with his own troupe? Obviously in this excerpts program he didn't show long stretches of difficult classical choreography, but in what he did show, he looked like he was in his prime.

Edited to add: I just realized there was a second article in the Telegraph, and Compton writes,

In fact, he doesn’t intend to stop dancing entirely; he has plans to mount his own programmes of work and to tour more widely. But his farewell to a place to which he has dedicated so much of his time and talent was both hugely emotional and a reminder of how much more he still has to give.

I'd travel to see this.

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Le Riche and Guillem have performed Ek's door duet before, and it's even been televised. So in lieu of what we missed:

In the spring Le Riche conducted a tour in France that featured Russell Maliphant's Critical Mass and Shift, Angelin Preljocaj's Annunciation, his own Odyssey and Le Jeune homme et la Mort. He was joined by Maliphant, Clairemarie Osta and Isabelle Ciaravola or Eleonora Abbagnato. He could be planning more tours along those lines.

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Well as a matter of fact, Nicolas Le Riche didn't really had a touring group like Manuel Legris had for example, before this year, where he was preparing his farewell and didn't have much to dance with POB. So he did this "Itinérance" tour this Spring and he will have a show next Autumn at Théâtre des Champs Elysées. Nothing more is announced yet.

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