“We dreamed so big and so loud”: Maud Le Pladec, one year after the Paris Olympics

Laura Cappelle

In 2024, Maud Le Pladec had the experience of a lifetime: as Director of Dance for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, she oversaw the creation of all the choreographies presented during the opening and closing ceremonies. One year later, the newly appointed director of the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine recalls this intense experience and the toll it took mentally and physically – as she continues to dream big for the future.

Last May, Maud Le Pladec was “already not sleeping much,” she recalls. The choreographer, who was the Director of Dance for the Paris 2024 Olympic ceremonies, was handling one urgent situation after another. One day, a bridge over the Seine river deemed too structurally fragile caused a tableau from the opening ceremony to be cancelled; the next, she had to convince Lady Gaga to dance with pompoms. All this while traveling all around the country to fine-tune the interventions of the French ballet companies involved, and overseeing the filming of other choreographers – such as Alexander Ekman,  in charge of the closing ceremony.

The pace was so frantic that two months before the Olympic Games kicked off, her body gave out: she dislocated her hip. “I was demonstrating a lot of the movement without taking the time to warm up, and I injured myself on a very silly hip swing. The joint came out so far out of its socket that the tendon almost snapped in two.” On crutches, using cabs, Le Pladec carried on regardless. Even her dog Charly, who usually follows her everywhere, could no longer see her as much.

One year later, in the choreographer’s Parisian living room, Charly is peacefully chewing on a stuffed phryge – the official mascot of the 2024 Games and a souvenir of this final “wrenched out” stretch. His owner is at a loss for words to describe the magnitude of the event and the emotions it triggered. “The stress is so intense that after a point you no longer even feel it,” says le Pladec. “If you become aware of it, it’s over, you can’t do it.”

The adventure began in the summer of 2022 when she received a phone call from theatre director Thomas Jolly, a few months before his official appointment as artistic director of the ceremonies. The two had collaborated on a 2016 production of the opera Eliogabalo, for the Paris Opera, but their first encounter dated back to the early 2000s. Jolly, then a student at the School of the National Theatre in Brittany, approached Le Pladec in a café to tell her that he had “absolutely adored” her performance in Love, a piece by Loïc Touzé.

By the time he asked her to come on board for the Olympic adventure twenty years later, Le Pladec had become the Director of the National Choreographic Center in Orléans. “My first thought was, ‘How am I going to fit this into my schedule?’,” she recalls with a laugh. Unlike Jolly, who had left his position as Director of Le Quai, a National Dramatic Center in Angers, Le Pladec split her time between both her job leading the Center and this major new endeavour. She also decided to “share the stage with a lot of choreographers” for the opening ceremony, including dancehall and afro specialist Tashinda and the electro company MazelFreten.

Over several months, the core team assembled by Jolly, which also included stylist Daphné Burki and composer Victor Le Masne, became a close-knit entity in the face of the titanic challenge – a show spread out along the Seine – and the intensity of the media exposure. “We laughed a lot, there was a lot of joy,” recalls Le Pladec, who admits she now feels somewhat nostalgic.

This joy was dampened on the morning of July 26 by one last unforeseen event: the rain, which fell relentlessly on the first event of the Paris 2024 Olympics. In the late afternoon, Le Pladec almost got stuck in Paris brought to a standstill after a final work session with Lady Gaga, who opened the festivities with “Mon truc en plumes,” Zizi Jeanmaire’s emblematic number. When the choreographer finally reached the Trocadéro esplanade across from the Eiffel Tower, she watched the ceremony – “for the first time in its entirety” – from a tent “behind official guests, eating a salad and drinking a beer,” she recalls. “The blue, white and red smoke came out and I broke down. I cried through the whole thing.”

As the scenes unfolded, involving hundreds of artists across genres, she offered the world a vast and inclusive panorama of French dance, “from ballet to contemporary, electro, cabaret, hip hop and krump.” Jolly’s staging, however, quickly provoked a wave of very violent reactions – particularly against the “Festivités” tableau, a Dionysian banquet featuring the singer Philippe Katerine as well as drag queens.

In May of this year, seven people were convicted by a Paris criminal court over the hateful messages they sent to Jolly, specifically about this part of the ceremony. Le Pladec says she also received death threats concerning the values the show conveyed: “But Thomas and I come from public service institutions, and openness, diversity and equality are all part of our mission statement. For us, these are the values of French culture.”

Last September, when the pressure finally decreased as the last medals of the Paralympic Games were awarded, Le Pladec still didn’t stop. Just as her Olympic marathon was coming to a close, she took over as director of the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, and had to manage a busy new season. At the end of October 2024, she finally took five weeks off to get physical therapy for her hip and clear her head.

The fatigue isn’t completely gone: “I left half of my soul at the Olympics,” she admits. Nonetheless, Le Pladec is gradually returning to choreography, with a new trio set to a score by minimalist composer Nico Muhly (for Sadler’s Wells in London) and a major project for the Philharmonie de Paris: an evening she will share with waacker Josépha Madoki around Bach and Vivaldi concertos, with the 26 performers of the Ballet de Lorraine.

And the sheer size and reach of the Paris 2024 ceremonies have left her with a newfound desire to experiment with “large-scale scenography” in the near future: “We dreamed so big and so loud. We didn’t actually have that many resources, but we made it work.” She has taken that ambition to the Ballet de Lorraine, where “internal dysfunctions” have already prompted her to roll up her sleeves. Without losing sight of some of the hard-won lessons she learned on the Olympic stage, she says: “Nothing is impossible – and everything is relative.”

Laura Cappelle is a Paris-based journalist and scholar. In 2023, she was appointed associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She edited a French-language introduction to dance history, Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (Seuil, 2020), and her new book, Créer des ballets au XXIe siècle, was published with CNRS Éditions in May 2024. She has been the Financial Times’ Paris-based dance critic since 2010, and the New York Times’ French theater critic since 2017. She is also an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine.

Static Choc by Ballet de Lorraine
Choreography: Maud Le Pladec
June 5
at l’Arsenal Cité Musicale, Metz

CONCERTO DANZANTE
Choreography: Maud Le Pladec & Josépha Madoki
June 6 & 7 2026
at Philharmonie de Paris