Paris Opera Ballerinas to go on strike over Christmas period
The dancers will put their feet down, following a strike by stagehands at the Paris Opera, whose walkout cancelled two performances of ‘The Nutcracker’ in early December. The stagehands went on strike earlier in November, stopping performances of ‘Turandot’ and ‘Cinderella’.
The ballerinas will go on strike for three days, the 23rd, 25th and 31st of December, over stalled negotiation talks on intermittent worker rights.
“A dancer has preparation time: makeup, dressing, undressing... Currently, a dancer spends around 42 hours per month preparing. However, the package allocated for this preparation time is equivalent to only 6 hours,” Matthieu Botto, Coryphée and dancer at the Paris Opera explains.
“This is no longer consistent with the reality of the dancer, we are therefore asking for regularisation of the package linked to this preparation time,” Botto, also a union representative, says.
In June, the ballet corps went on strike over the same issue, which was not satisfyingly resolved, says Botto.
“Our demand was not really followed by the general management. They preferred to propose a reorganisation of the dancer's day, with more rehearsals, finishing one earlier in the day. But this was not at all the desire for ballet at its core,” he told RadioFrance.
The strike was agreed upon on 11 December.
“Our goal is not to strike: we do not want to lose money either to the opera or to the employees, nor do we want the spectator to be unhappy," Botto says. "We wanted a preventive consultation which did not take place and, unfortunately, at the Opera as in other structures, it always comes down to the balance of power.”
It’s not the first time in recent years that the ballet dancers have gone on strike.
27 ballerinas took to the steps of the Palais Garnier instead of performing in the 2019 Christmas eve show of ‘Swan Lake’.
The protest was part of a month-long set of strikes that the Paris Opera participated in alongside many other sectors against France’s President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial pension reforms.
