mirror mirror
A solo by Dimitri Chamblas for Benjamin Millepied
In the spring of 2024, Benjamin and I found ourselves in the studio of his company, L.A. Dance Project, in Los Angeles. It was evening, the night had fallen, and we were alone in the brick and wood building. My notebook was filled with ideas, bursting with desires and sensitive intuitions. We were there, just the two of us, with a shared yearning to explore dance, stories, states, and memories. Only later would we realize that we were really there to reconnect.
I first met Benjamin at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Lyon—he was 13, and I was 15. Together, we discovered dance, virtuosity, the joy of refinement, abstraction, the intoxication of movement, musicology, and so many other new experiences, far from our families.
But that night in California, we dimmed the studio lights, leaving only the street lamps of Washington Boulevard as the sole source of illumination. I saw Benjamin’s silhouette in the distance, and as he moved closer, his face came into view. A curated selection of music played nonstop in the studio, like a film score accompanying the moment. Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Avia, and James Blake guided us as we stepped out of the everyday world.
Benjamin moved quickly, playing with exhaustion, shifting between states of anger, ecstasy, laughter, and nostalgia. He would collapse, only to rise again in a seemingly endless cycle. A wild succession of abstraction, virtuosity, breath, storytelling, sublime technique, and narrative took over his body, creating an unprecedented cohabitation of these elements. Long periods of recovery allowed the music to take center stage, and we listened, watching the empty space of the studio. Then, Benjamin would return, filled with spinning virtuosity and flight, making us forget the ground and saluting those who, in the sky, watched over us.
Light, music, and dance took turns inhabiting the space, and sometimes blended together, creating something entirely new.
On the drive back, we talked about Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie. As we drove along the highway at night, Benjamin read excerpts from his phone:
“I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting... Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity. ”
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie. Beacon Press, 1971
That night, we decided that this session in the studio—rooted in our shared history, trust, and the desire to create together—would be the foundation for a solo piece I would choreograph for him. And so, mirror mirror was born: a full-length solo, performed by Benjamin.
