In 1999, Niels Tavernier shared for several months the life of the Opéra de Paris corps de ballet. With extracts from performances and warm-ups in the wings, classes and rehearsals, the camera gradually enters into the intimacy of this special world. The director questions the dancers, and essential themes emerge: the choice of this profession, discipline, the physical effort, the mirror, solitude, retirement… 

The title of this first full-length film shot backstage in the Opéra Garnier states what is to come: the corps de ballet of the Opéra de Paris is filmed close-up at an often breathless pace, through which it renders the unremitting work of the interpreters. Niels Tavernier’s project was to show this perpetual movement and how the emotion of bodies is expressed. Tours, rehearsals, performances of various ballets one after the other, wardrobe and make-up sessions, these scenes from everyday life pay tribute to the dream of the dancers and to their commitment in this exacting discipline. Thanks to the many testimonies, the difficult and highly hierarchical world of ballet becomes here a space where we meet strong and endearing personalities. A film which, in the director’s words, seeks to understand the inexplicable: grace.

The Paris Opéra Ballet is the official ballet company of the Opéra national de Paris, otherwise known as the Palais Garnier, though known more popularly simply as the Paris Opéra. Its origins can be traced back to 1661 with the foundation of the Académie Royale de Danse and the Le Ballet de l'Opéra in 1713 by King Louis XIV of France.

The aim of the Académie Royale de Danse was to reestablish the perfection of dance. In the late seventeenth century, using 13  professional dancers to drive the academy, the Paris Opéra Ballet  successfully transformed ballet from court entertainment to a  professional performance art for the masses. It later gave birth to the  Romantic Ballet, the classical form of ballet known throughout the world. The Paris Opéra Ballet dominated European  ballet throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and  remains a leading institution in the art of ballet today.

Source: New World Encyclopedia