In Paris, Using Dance to Uncover Hidden History

Benjamin Millepied thinks big.

La Ville Dansée, a free festival of outdoor dance on Saturday, is the first large-scale initiative from Millepied’s Paris Dance Project. Starting at 11 in the morning and ending after midnight, it involves 12 choreographers and seven commissions; 10 neighborhoods in Paris and its outlying suburbs; podcasts, screenings and live streams.

The Paris Dance Project, which Millepied formed last year with Solenne du Haÿs Mascré, is not a dance company, but an organization that creates educational programs and accessible performances. La Ville Dansée (“the dancing city”), part of the Cultural Olympiad — a program of arts events around the Olympics — is its biggest splash yet, intended to show Paris and its environs not just as gorgeous settings for performance, but as places with hidden or forgotten histories.

Millepied returned to live in Paris last year after a decade spent mostly in Los Angeles. His last Parisian sojourn, 2014-2016, included a brief, contentious, term as the director of the Paris Opera Ballet, which he said provided some seeds for the idea of La Ville Dansée.

“I was running the best-funded institution in France, but only a fraction of society felt invited,” Millepied said in an interview in Paris in May. “It made me think about how much segregation there is, how people can have a very different experience in the same place. I decided we would commission works to tell the invisible stories of the city to gather people together who would never go to the theater, to build empathy and community.”

Millepied and du Haÿs Mascré gathered a small core team that included, unusually, a political theorist, Françoise Vergès, and a sociologist, Fabien Truong, as well as the dramaturg Christian Longchamp. Over months of weekly meetings, they discussed and identified sites for dance — some famous, like the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin du Luxembourg; others little known, like an abandoned supermarket in the town of Grigny and Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle, a church that was the site of a notable police raid on migrants in 1996.

Millepied researched and chose the diverse group of choreographers. Then came the logistics of raising money, getting permissions and coordinating technical teams across the city.