Guillaume Diop had heard the whispers: His feet were flat, his bottom too big; he would never get into the Paris Opera Ballet School. He proved the naysayers wrong, entering the school at 12.
Three years later he was ready to leave. He felt insecure about his body and his abilities, was restricting his eating and had received treatment for anorexia. His friends all aspired to join the Paris Opera Ballet, but Diop was not so sure. There was no one at the company who looked like him — and besides, he still dreamed of being a doctor.
But, at 18, Diop did join the Paris Opera Ballet. And in March 2023, he became its first Black étoile, or “star,” thrusting him into the spotlight as a symbolic figure for young dancers of color, as an emblem of a more diverse France and as a fashion-world darling.
The attention and pressure of flying the diversity flag is “sometimes overwhelming,” Diop, 24, said recently, speaking in his dressing room at the Palais Garnier, where the Paris Opera Ballet performs. “I’m very proud of the impact I can have on a younger generation,” he said. “But it is a weight, and it’s not easy to talk about because there is no one who shares it here.”
The previous evening, Diop had been scheduled to dance with Valentine Colasante on the first night of performances of “Paquita,” but the show was canceled at the last minute because some of the dancers were negotiating with management about pay. He seemed unfazed, murmuring simply that he was disappointed not to have danced.
What the audience missed: Diop’s beautiful line, astounding jump, arched feet and radiant stage presence.
Over 6 feet tall and long limbed, with striking green eyes and an infectious smile, Diop has an offstage charisma too. Although his clothes (big furry jacket, oversize tortoiseshell glasses) suggested a certain flamboyance, he is serious and thoughtful in conversation. (His English is excellent, learned, he said, from listening to Beyoncé.)
His anorexia, unusual for men, was partly about his perception that he couldn’t please his teachers at the school. “I felt like if I could control my weight,” he said, “maybe they will feel I was working harder. And I think because early on people would say, your thighs are too big, your ass is too big, that stayed in my mind.”
Diop’s parents — his father is from Senegal, his mother is French did not come from artistic backgrounds, but both had been supportive of his dancing, even if his father initially thought that ballet “wasn’t something for a Black boy,” Diop said. With the onset of his anxiety and anorexia, though, they had worried and wanted him to leave the school.
But Marc du Bouaÿs, Diop’s first teacher at the Paris Opera Ballet School, believed in his potential. “You need another kind of experience,” he told Diop, and helped him send an audition tape to an Alvin Ailey School program in New York. Despite his parents’ trepidation, the 16-year-old Diop set off for Manhattan.
It was exactly what he needed. “No one cared about the color of your skin, your height, your weight,” he said. “It made me realize that the dance world is huge, much bigger than the Paris Opera Ballet. I worried that I could never be a ballet prince because I had never personally seen a Black principal dancer. But here were so many people of color.”
Graciela Kozak, a ballet teacher at the Ailey School, felt an instant rapport with Diop, singling him out for his physical ability, beautiful training and intense commitment. “He already had a special aura that drew your eye,” she said. “He doesn’t just have the body, he has the soul. He dances from the heart. But he was a little shy and quiet. I told him, If you’ve got it, flaunt it!”
Diop flirted with the idea of staying in New York and auditioning for the Ailey company, but Kozak advised otherwise. “She said, Go back to the Opera, you have what it takes and you can change things for so many people of color,” Diop recalled. “I realized I really did want to do the big classical roles in Paris, to be the prince.”
The difference in Diop’s confidence and technical abilities was immediately apparent after that summer, said Luna Peigné, who joined the Paris Opera Ballet at the same time as Diop. “After Ailey, he really developed technically and found his identity,” Peigné said in a telephone interview. He was always charismatic, smiley, you noticed him in class, but now you understood he was going to go far.”
Diop graduated first in his class, and joined the Paris Opera Ballet in 2018. In 2020 came the Covid pandemic, lockdown, the death of George Floyd and the growing Black Lives Matter Movement. Unlike many other major ballet companies, the Paris troupe made no announcement of solidarity. “It made me quite angry,” Diop said. The handful of Black dancers in the company began to talk about their experience at the Opera.
“People hate talking about race here,” Diop said.
Benjamin Millepied, during his brief tenure as the company’s director, had tried to raise issues around diversity and blackface in performance only to be met with resistance and hostility. And there had been little conversation about those topics since.
“We realized we had been through certain traumas,” Diop said, “a level of microaggression, and realized we had to do something to help the next generation.”
Diop and four other dancers of color wrote a letter, asking the Opera’s 1,500 employees to support them in seeking the abolishment of blackface and yellowface in ballets; the adoption of makeup, tights and pointe shoes to match skin color; and changes to the school’s admission policy to increase diversity. Fewer than 300 signed in support.
The letter was leaked to the press, causing an uproar: Its authors were accused of lying, playing at being victims and looking for attention. “It was very hard for us all,” Diop said. “I think we all suffered a depression afterward.”
But Alexander Neef, who became director of the Paris Opera in October 2020, took the letter seriously, commissioning a report on diversity and implementing a number of changes. Not long after, in early 2021, Aurélie Dupont, who was then the director of the ballet company, had Diop, still at the lowest rank of quadrille, replace an injured dancer as Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet.” Six months later, he stepped in to “Don Quixote,” and then — with only three days’ notice — into “La Bayadère,” with Dorothée Gilbert, the company’s most senior ballerina.
“It’s complicated here, so hierarchical,” Peigné said, “and he was dancing all these main roles so young, without the official status. There was a lot of aggression from the dancers and teachers. But he has a lot of interior strength.”
Diop said he understood the frustration of more senior dancers who had been waiting for these opportunities. “Everyone was saying, ‘Guillaume is an understudy for these parts because he is Black,’” he said. “I was so frustrated, because I knew I could do it.”
By the end of 2022, Diop had been promoted to soloist rank (“sujet”), and Jose Martinez, who succeeded Dupont in December 2022, cast him in “Giselle.” Watching Diop in rehearsals, Martinez decided to nominate him to be an étoile, which is at the discretion of the Opera’s director. “I realized how focused, attentive and thoughtful he was about every correction, every gesture,” Martinez said in a telephone interview.
Martinez laughed when asked if he had been aware of jealousy around Diop’s casting and promotion to étoile. “My response is: Have you seen him dance?”
Watching Diop in a “Paquita” rehearsal with Colasante, another attribute was clear: He is a superb partner. (“Every female étoile wants to dance with him,” Martinez said.)
“Guillaume is very strong, very reliable and has big hands, so you feel very stable when he is supporting you in turns or balances,” Colasante said. “But more than that, he has an instinctive feeling for partnering, he will never cancel a rehearsal or be in a bad mood; he always wants to work and improve.”
Diop’s work ethic is notable, said Andrey Klemm, a ballet master with the company. “People can get a bit comfortable when they get to a certain level, but Guillaume is working even harder,” Klemm said. He added that Diop dances the classical roles “with the purest, cleanest academic positions, but he is also contemporary. It’s nice to have this modern prince here!”
Although Diop has performed many of the major classical roles, he had not had a work created on him until recently. In a guest appearance with the Royal Swedish Ballet in “Gustavia,” he appeared in a new full-length ballet based on the life of Gustav Badin Couschi, a slave brought to the Swedish court in the 1750s, who was adopted by the royal family.
“I was excited to embody someone like me,” Diop said, adding that the choreographer, Par Isberg, had wanted a lot of input. “It forced me to ask myself, what are my strengths, my weaknesses, what do I want to show?”
Diop said he would like to do more work with contemporary choreographers and (directors, are you listening?) to dance with Ailey, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. He would also like to create an arts school in Senegal with his family. “Last year I went four or five times,” he said. “It’s also an important part of who I am.”
And it’s important to bring that part of his identity to the Opera and to classical ballet, he said. “When we did the Défilé at the beginning of the season” — in which the entire company and school is presented — “there was a little boy wearing his cornrows and it was so cute. I wouldn’t have had the strength to do it at that age. Seeing that makes everything worthwhile.”
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