He had hysterized the largest rooms in the world, by dint of pirouettes and grand throws.
The star dancer Patrick Dupond died of a "lightning disease" as his family has just announced to AFP.
He had learned to dance with people who had known Nijinsky.
He cited his masters by their first names.
Maurice (Béjart), Roland (Petit), Jerome (Robbins), Rudolf (Nureyev), John (Neumeier), Alvin (Ailey), Claude (Bessy) as a litany of his personal saints.
"I inherited from them and I have a duty to pass on,"
he explained
.
In a chaotic life, dancing was a source of wisdom for him.
"If I had to do it again, I would do it again
," he explained last August to Le Figaro.
This art has me
open to inner peace, relying on the hands of a creator shakes up your certainties and reformats you to elegance
”.
Before continuing: “
The dance gave me a framework and a freedom, the means to exist in the beautiful way, doing good and escaping all the traps.
Many times, I fell, the dance got out of me. "
Patrick Dupond was born on March 14, 1959 in Paris.
His father left home very early and his mother is trying to channel the energy of this mischievous and turbulent son by enrolling him in football and judo.
Without success.
It is in classical dance that he finds his way.
Max Bozzoni, former dancer at the Paris Opera and ballet teacher, takes him under his wing.
He will be her "teacher for life" until his death in 2003.
In 1970, Patrick Dupond entered the dance school of the Paris Opera.
The young boy, who tires his teachers with his indiscipline, will climb all the levels of the venerable institution.
At 16, he entered the ballet as a trainee quadrille.
A year later, he asserted his character by entering alone in the international competition in Varna (Bulgaria).
He won the gold medal there.
In 1980, it was the consecration: he was named star at the Paris Opera. Ten years later, at only 31 years old, he distinguished himself as the youngest director of the Paris Opera ballet, before to be torn from its
"cradle of the Palais Garnier"
.
In January 2000, a car accident left him with 134 fractures, three artificial vertebrae, and a torn hand.
After nine months of convalescence, he goes back on stage for a musical,
L'Air de Paris
, before new days of storm two years later between burnout and alcohol.
As he approached sixty, he had regained faith in dancing and confessed to seeing himself neither in a state of failure nor of success, but
“on the way”
.
A resurrection that he owed in part to Leila da Rocha, former international basketball champion, spent with Martha Graham then converted into sacred oriental dance.
“She reframed me.
I am embarked on its dynamic, it directs me almost in spite of myself,
”he confided of her.
It was she who fought for him to become a juror of the television show "Prodigies", then of "Dance with the stars".
Because in the sky of the dancers, where the stars fly, the name of Patrick Dupond still carried all its light.
