Pierre Lacotte, Choreographer, Dies at 91
Pierre Lacotte at the Paris Opera, 2021. Photograph by Svetlana Loboff. ©Paris Opera and Svetlana Loboff.
On 10 April 2023, the renowned French choreographer Pierre Lacotte died by sepsis from an infected cut. He was 91. Lacotte was famous for his restagings of 19th-century ballets from the Romantic era. Born in Chatou, France, in 1932, he entered the Paris Opera Ballet School at the age of ten, graduated into the Paris Opera Ballet, and reached the highest rank of étoile (principal dancer) in 1952. He left the Paris Opera to create his own company in 1955, staging his own works and collaborating with popular musicians such as French chanson singer Charles Aznavour and the American jazz legend Duke Ellington. He also created ballets based on classic novels such as Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which he choreographed for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2021. But Lacotte’s passion were the lost ballets of the Romantic era. In 1971, he restaged Filippo Taglioni’s legendary original production of La Sylphide. Taglioni created the ballet for his daughter Marie Taglioni, the most iconic of all Romantic ballerinas. Over the years, Lacotte became France’s leading authority on ballets of the Romantic era, staging carefully researched re-creations all over the world. He gave a new life to 19th-century ballets such as Coppélia, The Daughter of the Danube, Marco Spada, Paquita and The Pharaoh’s Daughter.
But this highly influential advocate for the old Romantic ballet was also a key figure in a dramatic event that changed the history of ballet in the West: the Cold War defection of Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev in 1961. Nureyev was a young, up-and-coming star of Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet (today known as St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet). The 23-year-old was a sensation during the company’s first visit to the West, but the KGB, the Soviet secret police, was not pleased: Nureyev blatantly defied the KGB’s strict rules forbidding any unsupervised adventures, befriended Parisian dancers and enjoyed the city with them deep into the night. One of his closest Parisian friends was Pierre Lacotte. Nureyev bombarded Lacotte with questions about ballet and the two worked together in a ballet studio and explored Paris. When the Kirov was supposed to fly to London, Nureyev’s Parisian friends went to the airport to say goodbye to him. To their horror, they heard that Rudolf had been ordered back to Russia. He had disobeyed the KGB’s rules and shown his love for the West too clearly. Nureyev was desperate. He knew that he would never be allowed to travel to the West again. His career would be over. Lacotte was one of Nureyev’s French friends at the airport. According to Julie Kavanagh’s authoritative biography, Rudolf Nureyev. The Life, Lacotte went to up to the director of the Kirov, Konstantin Sergeyev, pleading that Nureyev should not be punished: “If Rudolf is being punished because he went out with us in Paris, I can assure you – I could even sign a letter – that he never said anything against you, and we never talked about politics. I take the responsibility for everything, but I don’t want him to be punished.” In the end, Nureyev’s friend Clara Saint, a young Parisian woman closely connected to the influential French Minister of Culture André Malraux, helped orchestrate Nureyev’s defection at the airport by telling him that he needed to approach two French policemen and ask them for political asylum.