Benjamin Millepied Brings Contemporary Dance to the Folies Bergère

Choreographer Benjamin Millepied is staging a season at the Folies Bergère, the storied Parisian theater better known for feathered cabaret than contemporary dance. "It's so alive and it's a place to do something for a broader public," Millepied said of the venue.

The season's centerpiece is "Move Me Once More," a work Millepied described as "a theater piece with dance and songs." The company first ran it onstage in late October, the first day that Millepied, his dancers, musicians and technical team assembled in the historic theater.

What does the piece look like?

A rehearsal moment captures its tone. A dancer, cantilevered at an improbable angle, revolved around a pole while others wandered languorously past — feathered and sequined, stockinged and suspendered, high-heeled and hatted.

The dancers deliberately echoed the performers of Paris's famous music halls: the Folies Bergère itself, the Crazy Horse and the Moulin Rouge, houses immortalized in posters and paintings of scantily clad, long-legged women doing the cancan.

Yet Millepied's material is not nostalgia. He has built a contemporary story set in a dystopian world in which sexually ambiguous characters are perhaps fantastical imaginings. The aesthetic borrows cabaret's wardrobe; the content pushes somewhere darker and less literal.

The 'Blue Danube' finale

The score includes Strauss's "Blue Danube" waltz. As it played, the dancers whipped each other in a mock-sexual frenzy and collapsed on the final notes.

"Yes," Millepied confirmed to a few spectators after the run. "There is a giant orgasm in 'The Blue Danube.'"

The remark is candid, and it signals the production's register: this is cabaret as a frame for explicit, stylized physical theater rather than an exercise in vintage pastiche.

Why it matters

The move pairs a choreographer committed to contemporary work with one of the most recognizable commercial stages in France. Millepied's own framing — "a place to do something for a broader public" — states the wager plainly: he wants the music hall's audience, not only the dance world's.

What the source does not yet say is how long the season runs, which other works appear on it, or how the Folies Bergère's regular public will respond to a dystopian, dance-driven program. Those answers will come when the season opens to paying audiences.

For now, the facts are these: a named choreographer, a landmark venue, a finished rehearsal, and a declared ambition to make serious dance speak in the language of cabaret.