The Paris Opera named Frenchman Guillaume Diop star dancer on Saturday, after a performance of Giselle in Seoul, granting the supreme title for the third time since José Martinez took office in December as director of dance. His appointment was announced on the stage of the LG Arts Center in Seoul, where the dancer, given an ovation, had just performed the role of Albrecht for the second time in the romantic ballet by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot.
His appointment comes just over a week after those of New Zealander Hannah O’Neill and Frenchman Marc Moreau, promoted after a performance of Imperial Ballet by George Balanchine, at the Palais Garnier in Paris. But it is symbolic in more ways than one. First because, very rarely, Guillaume Diop reached the title of star without going through the “first dancer” box, the previous grade. What only a handful of his predecessors accomplished, including Laurent Hilaire in 1985, Manuel Legris in 1986 or Mathieu Ganio in 2004.
His parents thought “a mixed-race boy had no place at the Opera”
But also because Guillaume Diop, born in 2000, is one of the five black and mixed-race authors of the manifesto From the racial question to the Opera, written in 2020 in the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. And that the accession of racialized dancers to the highest rank of the Paris Opera remains a rarity, after the previous Charles Jude and Kader Belarbi. The latter was recently dismissed from the direction of the Toulouse opera against a backdrop of accusations of bad management.
“I did not project myself as a dancer. Neither did my parents, who thought that a mixed-race boy had no place at the Opera. Personally, I saw myself more as a doctor.he told the Monde in December. It is however in a ballet that Guillaume Diop rose to the top of his art, after having already been entrusted with several star roles, thus dancing the main male roles in the Bayadere, Don Quixote, Swan Lake et Romeo and Juliet.
Introduced to dance at the age of 4, before beginning his apprenticeship in 2008 at the conservatory of the 18th arrondissement of Paris, he will soon be performing at the Wandering Companion’s Song by Maurice Béjart, at the Opéra Bastille between April 21 and May 28.