Roland Petit was born on January 13, 1924, in Villemomble, a quiet suburb near Paris, into a family already brushing against the edges of artistic life. His father was a shoemaker, and his mother was Rose Repetto, a name that would become famous in its own right: she later founded the dance shoe company Repetto, which became synonymous with French ballet. It was an early hint that the world of dance was woven into the fabric of Petit's origins, and he would spend the rest of his long life transforming that inheritance into one of the most adventurous bodies of choreographic work in twentieth-century ballet.
He entered the Paris Opéra Ballet school and trained under two of the institution's defining figures, Gustave Ricaux and Serge Lifar. Lifar was one of the dominant personalities in French ballet, a former star of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes who had taken over the Paris Opéra Ballet and shaped it in his own image. Petit absorbed both the technical rigor of the school and the theatrical ambition that Lifar embodied. He joined the corps de ballet in 1940, at sixteen, in the dark early years of the German occupation of Paris.
But the confines of the official opera ballet quickly proved too small for Petit's restless creative energy. In 1945, as France emerged from occupation and liberation, he founded the Ballets des Champs-Élysées, a company that reflected the libertarian spirit of postwar Paris and its hunger for art that was new, daring, and unmistakably French. The company became a gathering point for artists across disciplines, and Petit quickly established himself as a choreographer willing to take chances that the official institutions would not.
In 1946, he created what many critics and historians would come to regard as his masterpiece: Le jeune homme et la mort, or The Young Man and Death, with a libretto by Jean Cocteau. The work was startling in its conception. The choreography and costumes had an astonishing modernity, placing ballet in conversation with the existentialist sensibility that was then transforming French intellectual life. Decades after its premiere, the work was still being performed and still generating critical admiration for the freshness of its vision.
In 1948 Petit founded the Ballets de Paris at the Théâtre Marigny, with the dancer Zizi Jeanmaire as its star. Jeanmaire, who would later become Petit's wife in 1954 and the mother of their daughter Valentine, was a luminous presence who appeared in a number of his most celebrated works. In 1949, he created Carmen, a ballet that made unconventional use of the en dedans technique and became another landmark in his output.
The scope of Petit's collaborations was extraordinary. He worked with composers of the caliber of Constant Lambert for Ballabile in 1950 and Henri Dutilleux for Le Loup in 1953. He collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg, with the couturier Yves Saint-Laurent, and with the sculptor César Baldaccini. For décor he worked extensively with the painter Jean Carzou, as well as with Max Ernst and with figures from the nouveau réalisme movement including Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely. The willingness to reach across disciplines and bring painters, sculptors, composers, and literary figures into the ballet studio was characteristic of Petit's method throughout his career.
His return to the Paris Opéra in 1965 produced a production of Notre Dame de Paris, with a score by Maurice Jarre, bringing Victor Hugo's cathedral drama into the language of dance. In 1968, his ballet Turangalîla, set to the immense score by Olivier Messiaen, was described as provoking a small revolution within the Opéra. When Petit resigned in 1970 after only four months as director of ballet at the Paris Opéra, he did so by letter from home because, characteristically, he had no telephone in his office. His resignation was a protest against poor working conditions, failed labor negotiations, and management's refusal to approve three new ballet productions, accepting only one.
In 1972, Petit took his energies south and founded the Ballet National de Marseille, inaugurating it with a piece called Pink Floyd Ballet, created in collaboration with the famous British rock band. The alignment of classical dance with one of the era's defining rock groups announced that Petit's appetite for creative risk had not diminished with age. He directed the Ballet National de Marseille for the next twenty-six years, transforming it into one of France's major cultural institutions and producing a continuous stream of new works.
Petit's contributions to film added yet another dimension to his career. He choreographed for the 1948 film Alice in Wonderland, The Glass Slipper in 1954, Anything Goes in 1956, and appeared as choreographer, writer, and dancer in Black Tights in 1960. In 1994 he received the Prix Benois de la Danse as choreographer, one of ballet's most prestigious international honors. By the time of his death in Geneva on July 10, 2011, at the age of eighty-seven, from leukemia, he had choreographed 176 works across all genres, a prolific output that encompassed everything from abstract works to narrative ballets, from opera-house spectacle to avant-garde experiment. His memoirs, published in 1993 under the title J'ai dansé sur les flots, offered a vivid account of a life lived entirely in the service of movement and beauty.
