Paris (AFP)

Never three without four: after three postponements due to a historic strike and the pandemic, the star dancer Eleonora Abbagnato bids farewell to the Paris Opera on Friday evening, initially planned ... in 2019.

"I think it was my last chance as Aurélie told me (Dupont, director of dance at the Opera, editor's note)", jokes the 42-year-old Italian in a dressing room after a rehearsal of "The Young Man and la Mort ”by Roland Petit at the Palais Garnier.

"I have never left, it seems ... I find this incredible energy of the Palais Garnier, it's one of the most beautiful scenes", adds this blonde and slender dancer who since 2015 has assumed the double hat of star and director of the Rome Ballet.

It is with an evening in tribute to the great French choreographer that Eleonora Abbagnato will officially say goodbye to the prestigious tercentenary house where she has been dancing for 25 years.

Farewells which should have taken place on December 23, 2019 but which were canceled due to a historic strike by artists and employees of the Opera against the reform of special regimes then defended by the government.

The pandemic caused two more postponements.

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But "things are well done", notes the dancer who considers the homage to Roland Petit as a "gift", and for good reason: it is he who "discovered me at the age of 11 in a small private school in Sicily. For me, it was the great choreographer of French dance who took me to the Paris Opera, "she says.

She dances in two of her ballets, "Le Rendez-Vous" and "Le Jeune Homme et la Mort" - created on a libretto by Cocteau and which features a young painter driven to suicide by his lover - a ballet that she danced a lot from the age of 19.

Farewell is a tradition at the Opera where the stars, retired at the age of 42, receive a standing ovation under a shower of confetti and glitter.

But Eleonora Abbagnato, married to ex-footballer Federico Balzaretti, with whom she had two children, and a regular guest on Italian TV shows, has long prepared her next world.

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Having wanted to "save dance in Italy", where two companies in Florence and Verona had closed their doors, in 2015 she took the reins of the Ballet de Rome, with the agreement of the dance director of the Opera at the time, Benjamin Millepied.

- "Fate is well done" -

The company gained visibility under his mandate with the invitation of great choreographers and a collaboration with Dior, even if it briefly suffered in August 2019 a brief crisis with a union of dancers for "disrespectful attitude".

Her journey, since her birth in a family more interested in football than in dance, looks like a fairy tale: fell in love with ballet because her mother looked after her in the afternoons in a dance school in Palermo located below her clothing store, spotted by Roland Petit then by Claude Bessy, the legendary director of the Opera School of Dance, which she joined at the age of 14.

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At the time, she was one of the few foreigners to become "Opera's little rat" and was also part of the handful of foreigners who achieved the supreme title of star.

Roland Petit, who did not spare the young dancer with remarks on her flexibility, "told me that it was very hard to enter this house".

"It is fate that is ultimately well done, because Roland Petit brought me to all these beautiful roles, very very young, until the end of my career. I am ending this great parenthesis with him", adds the 'star.

© 2021 AFP