PARIS — In a major coup, the Paris Opera Ballet has secured one of the dance world’s biggest names, William Forsythe, as the company’s associate choreographer.
The news was announced on Wednesday along with other plans for the ballet’s new season in September, the first programmed by Stéphane Lissner, the Opera’s general director since July, and Benjamin Millepied, the director of dance since November. Among the most significant plans were the creation of a Paris Opera Academy and a new digital platform, a series of ambitious new works, and an unusual level of cooperation between the opera and ballet companies
Mr. Forsythe, who stepped down as director of the Forsythe Company in 2013, will create a new piece for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016 that will be part of a full evening of his work, and will be the first piece he has made since 1999 for a company other than his own. Mr. Forsythe will also work with the dancers for three months each season. That period will include time spent with participants in the newly conceived academy, a training program to develop choreographers, musicians, stage directors and singers.
“He is an incredibly important choreographer who is connected to an American and Balanchine legacy, and an amazing teacher,” Mr. Millepied said in an interview on Monday in his office at the Palais Garnier, before the formal season announcement at the Bastille Opera on Wednesday. “Our conversations together are all about ballet: technique, musicality, expression, precision. There is a real connection and interest we share.”
Additional new pieces will come from Justin Peck (whose “In Creases” is also part of the season), Wayne McGregor, Jérôme Bel and Mr. Millepied; while works by George Balanchine, Boris Charmatz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Christopher Wheeldon, Jerome Robbins, Alexei Ratmansky and Maguy Marin join the Opera repertory. There are just three full-length ballets; Nureyev’s “Bayadère” and “Romeo and Juliet,” and Patrice Bart and Eugène Polyakov’s “Giselle.”
Mr. Millepied said musical choices had been central to the commissioning of new work, with Mr. McGregor creating a piece to Pierre Boulez’s “Anthème II” as part of a full-evening homage to the composer, and Mr. Peck using Poulenc’s “Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra,” which Mr. Millepied described as “a significant French score that is rarely performed.” The artist John Baldassari will design the sets for Mr. Peck’s ballet.
Mr. Millepied said his programming had been strongly influenced by the history of the Paris Opera Ballet and his own experience as a dancer with the New York City Ballet. “Since Louis XIV, the idea of being a choreographer here was looked at as a craft. The early choreographers understood music notation and could write a dance score. I want to show work by people who are really skilled craftsmen.” As examples, he cited Mr. Ratmansky, whose “Seven Sonatas,” to Scarlatti, will enter the repertory, and who will create a new full-length work to Richard Strauss’s ballet score “Schlagobers” in the 2016-17 season, as well as Mr. Wheeldon, whose 2001 “Polyphonia,” to pieces by Ligeti, will be his first work danced by the Paris troupe.
Mr. Millepied and Mr. Lissner also announced the creation of “3e Scene,” or “third stage,” a digital platform on the Paris Opera Ballet website for new work by composers, choreographers, directors, visual artists, filmmakers and writers. “We want to build a platform that creates our own content and provides a way to look at work coming from us without being in the actual buildings,” Mr. Millepied said.
Signaling an intention to bring the opera and ballet companies closer together, the season will also feature a double bill of Tchaikovsky’s opera “Iolanta” and his ballet “The Nutcracker,” which involves five choreographers (Arthur Pita, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Liam Scarlett, Edouard Lock and Mr. Millepied) directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, and a shared focus on the music of Arnold Schoenberg.
The collaboration between Mr. Millepied, Mr. Lissner and the music director Philippe Jordan on this programming — along with “3e Scene” and the new Academy — is a departure from recent decades, when dance policy has generally had little input or interference from the general director, even though he or she must approve all decisions.
“It is extremely important to me that there is a sense of unity between the two theaters, Bastille and Garnier,” Mr. Lissner said in an interview on Monday in his office at the Bastille Opera, “between the Paris Opera Ballet School, the ballet company, the singers and the orchestra.”
Mr. Lissner, who enlisted Mr. Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet as a resident company for eight years during his tenure as director of the Théâtre du Châtelet here, said he was thrilled by the choreographer’s new association with the Opera.
In a telephone conversation from his home in Vermont, Mr. Forsythe, who created his first work for the Paris Opera Ballet, “France Dance,” in 1983 and went on to choreograph his breakthrough “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” there in 1987, said he had not been looking for a position with a ballet company when Mr. Millepied suggested it. (He will also join the University of Southern California’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance as a professor in the fall.)
“We had been talking about me making a new piece for the company ever since he got the job,” Mr. Forsythe said. “He told me about his idea of starting a choreographic academy, and it went from there.” Mr. Forsythe added that he thought Mr. Millepied wanted to bring “an expanded sense of possibility” to the company. “
Mr. Millepied said the idea of teaching the craft of dance-making was behind the conception of the academy.
He plans to offer a two-year residency to two choreographers from outside the Opera and three from the company. “We won’t necessarily discover more geniuses, but there will be more competence,” he said. “Composers learn the principles of harmony, counterpoint, technique, and choreography is no different.”
This first season, Mr. Lissner said, is the basis for the next six. “We’ve thought about a long-term plan for what we want,” he said. “This season represents about half of what is to come. That’s the ambition.”
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