From Black Swan to Brisbane: Benjamin Millepied headlines festival with blockbuster dance piece

Before taking his seat at Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s Russell Street Wine Bar, Benjamin Millepied takes a moment to train his Fujifilm camera on the flowering Pink Trumpet tree holding a pose outside on South Bank.

He has flown in from Paris the previous day, and Brisbane has put on one of its glorious, cloudless, late-winter days for him. It’s his first time in the River City, but he’s no stranger to Australia. He lived for a year in Sydney while directing his 2022 movie Carmen, which starred Paul Mescal and Melissa Carrera, while his wife at the time, Natalie Portman, was shooting Thor: Love and Thunder at Fox Studios.

“We went as far as Byron Bay,” he says. “I got really fond of Australia, so I want to continue this relationship.”

Millepied, 48, is by far the biggest name this year’s Brisbane Festival has attracted; a coup for outgoing artistic director Louise Bezzina, who reached out to his LA Dance Project (LADP) company after seeing his gender-fluid Romeo and Juliet Suite at the Sydney Opera House in 2023.

As a result, Millepied is staging a sort-of world premiere at QPAC. Gems brings together three short dance works created in 2013, 2014 and 2016 in partnership with jewellery firm Van Cleef & Arpels. Each is inspired by a gemstone – rubies, diamonds and emeralds.

The idea mirrors a 1967 trilogy George Balanchine choreographed for the New York City Ballet titled Jewels that has become a modern classic, performed as recently as 2023 by The Australian Ballet.

Millepied, however, grimaces when I mention the Balanchine work.

“No, it’s not inspired by Balanchine,” he insists. In fact, Millepied is now sorry his trilogy is titled Gems, and it will revert to new title Reflections when it’s performed in Los Angeles in October.

“The connection to Balanchine is not an easy one for me,” he says, “because Jewels is a masterpiece. I’m not redoing a masterpiece of classicism! It’s my own triptych.”

It would be difficult to accuse Millepied of lacking in ideas, or drive, given the multitude of projects he has on his CV (more than 55), and the number he has on the go. (Fans of nominative determinism will have noted that his surname means thousand feet.)

In June, his program of free dance performances, La Ville Dansée, took place across Paris. Grace: Jeff Buckley Dances, a ballet about the singer-songwriter’s tragic life, has just finished its run in Nice.

In October, LADP is touring Rituel to the Lincoln Center, and in the French winter he’s returning to The Nutcracker, a ballet that confounded him the first time he tried to stage it in 2006.

“I danced Balanchine’s [version], which is a really incredible piece of choreography. So when I made that Nutcracker I was incapable of choreographing [it].”

Time and experience have freed his muse for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Nice production. “In four days I made this new version, where I felt completely free from the past, so I think now, that’s where I’m at. I feel very liberated.”

Millepied was born in Bordeaux and lived his early life in Senegal, where his father trained track and field athletes. “In Africa, it’s just part of life. Everybody dances.”

He began ballet lessons with his mother, ballerina Catherine Flory, as a child; studied at Lyon’s Conservatoire National; and won a scholarship to the School of American Ballet in New York at 16.

There he came under the influence of legendary West Side Story choreographer (and Oscar-winning co-director of the 1961 film version) Jerome Robbins. “What he taught me, I would say, is authenticity: being yourself on stage, being yourself in your relationship to others.”

Millepied joined the New York City Ballet at 18 and choreographed his first ballet, Passages, in 2001, at age 24, spending the next few years creating works for major companies in New York and Europe.

So he was already on a major upward trajectory in 2009 when filmmaker Darren Aronofsky invited him to choreograph the quasi-horror movie Black Swan and to instruct its stars, Portman and Mila Kunis.

He ended up playing the male dancer in the film, and marrying Portman, who won an Oscar for her performance. The marriage turned his life into a tabloid circus, while amplifying his opportunities. Two children, Aleph and Amalia, resulted. The couple divorced in 2024.

He launched LADP in 2012 with the backing of Van Cleef & Arpels. He later spent a turbulent two years attempting to modernise the Paris Opera Ballet, resigning in 2016.

The opportunity to restage Gems has allowed him to amend works conceived when LADP was a very young company. “The third piece, On the Other Side, is practically new. In a way it’s a premiere in Brisbane.”

Revisiting his collaboration with three great artists who worked on the sets – Liam Gillick, Mark Bradford and Barbara Kruger – has been particularly satisfying. Kruger is the conceptual artist who emerged in the 1980s with slogans such as “Your body is a battleground”.

“She has this ability to bring intellectual tension that’s quite emotional, and extraordinary,” Millepied says. “She doesn’t go in the direction of what you’re seeing. Sometimes she goes against it.”

The Frenchman was an obvious choice to plot out the syncopated ‘sandwalk’ for the Denis Villeneuve Dune films – an irregular pattern of walking adopted by the film’s desert dwellers to avoid attracting giant sandworms.

For a dance figure with such strong ties to film, Millepied has seemingly contradictory ideas about what is wrong with contemporary dance. In short: it’s our phones.

“Choreography lacks the 360-degree quality,” he says. “Most is very frontal – choreographed to face the phone. Also, it’s very dramatic and superficial, trying to catch attention versus the larger picture of the real complexity of human nature.

“I wanna see less gratuitous drama, and more sophistication. I wanna see more poetry.”

Gems is performed at the Playhouse, QPAC, Brisbane, September 4-7.