French Theatre & Dance
France created the institutions that define Western performing arts. The Comédie-Française is the oldest active theatre company in the world. The Paris Opera Ballet is the oldest professional ballet company. The vocabulary of classical dance — every position, step, and movement — is French. And French theatrical tradition, from Molière to the absurdists, remains one of the most vital and experimental in Europe.
Theatre
Molière and the Classical Age
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin — Molière (1622–1673) — is the Shakespeare of French theatre: the standard against which all subsequent playwrights are measured. His comedies — Le Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Le Malade imaginaire — are satires of hypocrisy, pretension, and social climbing that remain funny and precise after 350 years.
Molière collapsed on stage during a performance of Le Malade imaginaire on 17 February 1673 and died at home hours later — the most dramatic exit in French theatrical history. The Church initially refused him burial in consecrated ground (actors were excommunicated under canon law), but Louis XIV intervened.
Seven years later, Louis XIV merged Molière's company with two rival troupes to create the
The Enlightenment to the 19th Century
Voltaire wrote twenty-seven plays (largely forgotten today). Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro were revolutionary — the servant outsmarts the master, the social hierarchy is mocked. Mozart and Rossini turned them into operas, but the theatrical originals remain sharper.
The nineteenth century was dominated by melodrama and the
Twentieth Century: Absurdism and Beyond
The most original French theatrical movement of the twentieth century was the Theatre of the Absurd — though its two greatest practitioners were foreigners living in Paris. Samuel Beckett (Irish) wrote En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1952), and Eugène Ionesco (Romanian) wrote La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano, 1950). Both premiered in tiny Paris theatres and became the most influential plays of the postwar era.
Jean Vilar founded the
Dance
The Birth of Ballet
Ballet was born at the French court. Catherine de' Medici brought Italian dance masters to France in the sixteenth century, and the first recognisable ballet — the Ballet comique de la Reine — was performed at the Louvre in 1581. Louis XIV, himself an accomplished dancer who performed the role of the Sun King in the Ballet de la Nuit (1653), founded the
Pierre Beauchamp codified the five basic positions of ballet. Every subsequent development — the turnout, pointe work, the pas de deux — was refined in French studios and codified in French terminology.
The Paris Opera Ballet
The Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris — housed at the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille — is the oldest professional ballet company in the world. Its school trains dancers from ages eight to eighteen in one of the most rigorous programmes in existence. Graduates who join the company begin as
Contemporary Dance
France is one of the world's leading centres for contemporary dance. The
Where to See Theatre & Dance in France
- Comédie-Française (Salle Richelieu), Paris: Classic and contemporary repertoire from the permanent troupe
- Palais Garnier, Paris: Ballet and opera in Charles Garnier's opulent 1875 theatre
- Festival d'Avignon (July): Three weeks of theatre, dance, and performance in Provence
- Théâtre de l'Odéon, Paris: One of France's six national theatres, specialising in contemporary European drama
- Théâtre de la Huchette, Paris: La Cantatrice chauve has played here continuously since 1957 — the longest-running play in the world