As the Junior Ballet of Paris’ foremost dance institution makes its Asian debut with the support of Chanel, director José Martinez returns to the beginnings of his improbable ascent and lays out his vision for a more resonant future for the art form
There is a moment in almost every dancer’s life when the body reveals itself before the mind has caught up: spine tilting without instruction, shoulders stirring to a piano note suspended in the air, fingertips lifting as if drawn by an invisible thread. For José Martinez, that first spark unfolded in a far less romantic setting when he was nine: a children’s Christmas costume party in coastal Spain. Conscripted by his mother merely to help his sister into her outfit, the lanky lad had no intention of joining in — he barely understood what ballet was — yet the school’s dance teacher noticed the natural ease with which he whirled among the children and sensed, instantly, an innate musicality. Perhaps, she thought, it was worth seeing what this gifted one could do in a class.
Except he baulked at the barre, wanting nothing to do with it.
“The teacher was very clever,” says Martinez — born in 1969, Cartagena — smiling as he sits across from us. “She put me in the school’s production of Grease, where I played John Travolta’s Danny Zuko, since I was the only boy.” The memory still amuses him, even decades after his earliest training in the bolero-leaning traditions of classical Spanish dance. “I enjoyed myself so much that afterward she told me, very calmly, that if I wanted to keep performing, I would have to do the barre. And I agreed, because I just wanted to be on stage and keep having fun.”
Photo: Julien-Benhamou
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Last month, Martinez — now director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet — was in Malaysia accompanying the newly formed Junior Ballet as it took its ambition beyond Europe, with Kuala Lumpur marking the ensemble’s first stop in Asia. Over two evenings at Dewan Filharmonik Petronas, the troupe reached a major milestone for a company that exists, in large part, because of his direction. Created in 2024 with luxury house Chanel as founding patron, the Junior Ballet brings together 24 dancers aged 18 to 23, each selected through stringent competition for a two-year training and performance contract. Conceived as an incubator for emerging talent, the group aims to diversify the Paris Opera Ballet’s recruitment, prepare aspirants for professional life and extend its footprint beyond the City of Light.
It presented a programme of three ballets, including Eternal Rift, a new work by choreographer Julian Nicosia, for which the French brand designed a striking suite of costumes: sculptural black unitards traced with refined gold embroidery, their stylised wheat motifs glinting like luminous slivers with every swish or sway. The single stroke of gold against darkness suggests that renewal often begins with the faintest crack of light. The visual language broadens in additional looks: a vast, oversized coat engulfs the figure almost to the point of disappearance, evoking the doubt or fear that can bury a person before they rise; and in counterbalance, wide black trousers and tank tops that lay the wearer bare, exposing the rawness of motion and underscoring the piece’s exploration of strength and vulnerability.
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Photo: Julien-Benhamou
This creative collaboration, in fact, sits within a long lineage. Chanel’s ties to dance date back more than a century, anchored in the shared principles of creative independence and expressive power of movement. In the 1920s, Gabrielle Chanel gravitated towards the circle of avant-garde artists, forging a close friendship with Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev and later becoming his patron. Her first foray into the realm of ballet as a couturière came in 1924, dreaming up sleek silhouettes for Le Train Bleu, followed by contributions to works such as Apollon Musagète composed by Stravinsky and Bacchanale, envisaged jointly with Salvador Dalí. It is a history that continues to shape the house’s present-day partnerships — and one that resonates with Martinez.
“Every fabric affects how a person articulates — it can liberate the body or restrict it, and Chanel understands physicality needs freedom. Nothing we do is stiff; nothing they create is either. We also hold a respect for tradition. Because both our institutions protect our heritage, we have the foundation we need to build something bolder, even wilder.” He adds that the Junior Ballet exists today because of this mutual trust. The maison is also the Exceptional Patron of the Paris Opera’s Nouvel Air, Nouvelle Ère renovation project, which from 2027 will rejuvenate the infrastructure and artistic spaces across all four of the institution’s sites: Palais Garnier, Opéra Bastille, Ateliers Berthier and École de Danse in Nanterre.
It is a level of support Martinez could scarcely have imagined in his youth. In the past, such scaffolding — the mix of institutional backing and structured training pathways — was rare. Those starting out relied on grit and the limited mercy of their ankles, simply leaping into the deep end and hoping they stuck the landing. Every fall was Martinez’s own to navigate, especially after he left Spain for France as a teenager to enrol at prima ballerina Rosella Hightower’s École Supérieure de Danse in Cannes, where he studied under the exacting eye of José Ferran. From there, he won the prestigious Prix de Lausanne scholarship in 1988 and entered the Paris Opera Ballet. His tapered 1.89m physique and musical instinct carried him across an extraordinary range of roles, from princely leads in the great classical repertoire, such as Swan Lake and Giselle, to darker monarchs in Jean-Claude Gallotta’s Nosferatu and Yury Grigorovich’s Ivan the Terrible.
“In Spain, I was only practising an hour, three times a week. As for Cannes, it became six hours daily, six days a week, while learning French on the side. On Sundays, we watched videos together and talked about how to improve. It was a life lived entirely inside the ballet world. The regime and discipline were intense, gruesome even. I was a left-turner, but here, you had to turn to the right, so I had to relearn everything from the ground up. Still, I enjoyed the process very much. I always say I didn’t choose dance; dance chose me,” says Martinez, who, in 1997, at the end of La Sylphide — the Romantic-era tale of a Scotsman bewitched by an otherworldly spirit — was named danseur étoile, or star dancer, the highest rank at the Paris Opera Ballet.
The achievement proved pivotal, and what followed was a trajectory marked by momentum and acclaim. Over the next decade, the institution’s Spanish étoile claimed the Danza & Danza Prize (1998), Spain’s Premio Nacional de Danza (1999) and Premio de las Artes Escénicas (2005), the Léonide Massine-Positano Prize for Tricorne, and the France/China Prize (2004). Named Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres — a French distinction awarded to those who have significantly contributed to the arts — he also founded his own touring ensemble, José Martinez en Compagnie, which appeared widely across Europe and the US.
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As his career gathered pace, the urge to be involved in the storytelling rather than purely inhabit it grew stronger. His evolution from performer to choreographer, therefore, felt almost inevitable. In 2002, he premiered his own rendition of Mi Favorita, a Donizetti-infused curation that stretched the classical vocabulary with flashes of humour and fantasy — a sensibility he later revisited on the Palais Garnier stage. Between 2011 and 2019, as artistic director of the Spanish National Dance Company, he worked on a broader canvas, shaping a repertory that balanced classical and neoclassical expressions with the contemporary voices of Mats Ek, Ohad Naharin, Angelin Preljocaj and Jirí Kylián. During those years, fragments of his childhood began to surface: the pulse of flamenco, the folk tales told in the summer heat, the earthy theatricality of Cartagena. His Don Quixote channels all of this — a poetic reimagining with Hispanic temperaments that bears little resemblance to the bravura spectacle audiences may expect, yet remains unmistakably Martinez.
Of all the luminaries he crossed paths with, it was Ek who influenced him in ways no one else quite managed. Being guided by the Swedish avant-garde maestro felt like a gentle dismantling, a peeling away of varnish until only truth remained. “I was trying to do my best technically, but he told me something that changed the rest of my life. ‘I don’t want to see the dancer. I want to see you,’ he said. That was incredibly hard. How do you respect the choreography while revealing the person behind the steps? But a performance without a dancer’s soul … it means nothing.”
It is a lesson he now impresses upon his own students, encouraging them towards a kind of authenticity that resists being boxed into a label or wrapped in any iconography. And so the question arises: What, then, makes a good dancer?
“You must be able to rouse the audience,” Martinez asserts. “People may admire a remarkable jump or twirl for a few seconds, but if their hearts are touched, they will remember it forever.” Technique, in his view, is only the beginning; what matters is sincerity — the courage to show something true. Yet he recognises the landscape is shifting.
Young dancers today, he notes, often want everything quickly, retreating when a challenge feels too demanding. “It’s part of society now. We protect everyone so much that they think they shouldn’t push. But like an athlete, you sometimes have to go beyond your limit, to achieve the results or arrive at something beautiful. That’s why the ones who truly thrive feel like a natural selection — some will rise faster, some more slowly. In the end, what sets the best apart is the willingness to go beyond comfort while staying connected to who they are.”
That conviction feeds directly into his vision for the Paris Opera Ballet. He endeavours to commission a new wave of classical works — pieces rooted in the canon but not confined by it, where the formal architecture of dance can loosen into something more conversational, resonant and responsive to the realities outside of the theatre. The following chapter, he believes, must feel relevant, human and alive. If legacy is the spine of the company, Martinez hopes to give it a beating heart — one capable of carrying the art form into its next evolution.
