The rain-soaked Paris Olympics opening ceremony soared or sank, depending on whom you ask, but the spectacle hit the high-water mark one hour and 24 minutes in. Dancing in white sneakers, on the zinc roof of the Hôtel de Ville, was the 24-year-old ballet star Guillaume Diop.
Brimming with joy, the performance cemented Diop as both a once-in-a-generation dancer and a symbol of a modern, multicultural France. Still, all he was thinking about was not falling over. “It was a bit scary because the original floor was super-slippery, so we changed it for a carpet,” he smiles. The day we meet, he’s sipping a ginger juice at the Paris outpost of Soho House, in the lively Pigalle neighbourhood where he lives, wearing a sand-blasted-denim jacket and matching jeans. “It was also very hard to dance with my sneakers. But doing ballet in a more casual look makes it so much more accessible and real.” As he points out: “We picture a danseur étoile in a certain way, and I don’t think I quite fit that picture.”
Long-limbed and elegant, Diop is the kind of charismatic stage personality you instantly fall for. “He has a sense of kindness that is quite palpable and visible when he’s on stage,” says Aurélie Dupont, former director of dance at the Paris Opéra Ballet, who immediately saw that the young Diop had “something extra”. “It’s an important quality because it means he immediately wins over the sympathy of the audience.” Dorothée Gilbert, the company’s top-ranking ballerina, who asked to dance with Diop in what would be his breakthrough performance of Swan Lake in 2022, agrees. “He brings youth and a fresh perspective to the roles I perform with him,” she says. “He works incredibly hard, has the same high standards as I do, and is very confident on stage.”
Eighteen months on from his appointment as the first Black danseur étoile at the Paris Opera Ballet, Diop is closing out a momentous summer that saw him return to the role of Albrecht in Giselle at the Palais Garnier, appear as a guest judge on an episode of Drag Race France, and star in a global campaign for Jacquemus’s collaboration with Nike. He loves fashion and the feeling is increasingly mutual: he walked in Miu Miu’s AW24 show and has sat front row at Prada, Dior and Balmain. “I was feeling myself!” he giggles, of his catwalk debut. “I felt so… empowered.”
Diop discovered dance aged four, when he snuck into his older sister’s contemporary class at the activity centre in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, where his family lived. Spotting his potential, his teacher suggested he switch to ballet when he was eight. “I liked the fact that it was really strict and hard,” he recalls of those early barre lessons. “Even if you do the same thing every day, there is always a way to do it better.” Unlike many principals for whom ballet is an all-consuming vocation, however, Diop never thought it would develop into a career. “Dance has always been a way to express myself with my body,” he says. “But I liked studying. I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer.”
His Senegalese father works for Aeroméxico; his French mother for the local council in Gennevilliers, a northwestern suburb of Paris. Neither knew much about ballet other than the Black Swan, bleeding-toes clichés. His father encouraged him in athletics, believing ballet was “no place for a boy, much less a mixed-race boy”, as Diop once put it. When he joined the prestigious Opera Ballet School as a gangly 12-year-old, he found the rigour and intensity challenging. “I was always very connected to the happiness of dancing,” he says. “Sometimes I wasn’t like the other boys. I wasn’t like, ‘I want to do my best.’ I was like, ‘I want to have fun.’”
Diop came close to quitting at 16. “I was very anxious, feeling like I wasn’t good enough,” he says. He struggled with body image. “Now I’m fine, but when I was in school it was something that was hard for me,” he says. “I had an anorexia episode… I was checking my thighs every day.” When he was invited to spend five weeks at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York, his parents needed convincing. “They were super-scared. They were like, ‘We are the worst parents ever… He is going to be by himself, so far away…’”
It turned out to be the making of him. Having taught himself English largely by learning Beyoncé lyrics, he mastered Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix (bolstered by regular cooking lessons over the phone with his mum) and immersed himself in a diverse troupe of dancers. He also rediscovered a love of classical dance. “It made me understand that I wanted to do the big classical roles, especially the Rudolf Nureyev ballets, because the male dancer has a lot to do. It made me want to come back to Paris.”
Since then, Diop’s progress through the strict hierarchy at the Paris Opera – he joined the corps de ballet in 2018 – has been stunningly swift. When, in 2021, experienced principal Germain Louvet fell injured, Dupont cast Diop as Romeo in Nureyev’s Romeo and Juliet with a week’s notice. He was still in the lowest-ranked corps. A year later, Diop was promoted to coryphée, then sujet the following year. In March 2023, he was made danseur étoile, the highest of the five ranks, bypassing the premier danseur stage that precedes it. “The flash promotion of a radiant performer”, Le Monde announced. Diop was suddenly one of the youngest étoiles in the 350-year history of the dance company.
For Luna Peigné, a coryphée dancer and Diop’s best friend since they met at ballet school aged 12, his ascent can be traced to his Romeo. “Everything changed for him after that,” she says. “He was quite shy when he was younger. But I discovered a new Guillaume. I sensed he was ready to take his place as an étoile.”
In 2020, Diop had been one of five dancers to co-author a manifesto calling on the Paris company to tackle racism in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Among the demands were an official ban on blackface (in use as recently as 2015), a plea for shoes, tights and make-up that matched a dancer’s natural skin tone, and action on racist caricatures in classical productions. The Paris Opera responded with a 66-page diversity report and a pledge to change the ballet school’s recruitment process.
Today, Diop is keen for the discussion of his career to not always come back to race – he prefers to let his actions do the talking. In May, he spent 10 days in French Guiana teaching workshops to children aged eight to 16 as part of an Opera-led initiative to encourage local talent. He sees himself as a role model – alongside Royal Ballet principals Francesca Hayward and Marcelino Sambé, and the American ballerina Misty Copeland – but he still feels “representation is lacking” on a global scale. “And I feel it’s important also to tell parents that [ballet] is not only for white people.”
On rare days off in Paris, Diop enjoys a glass of wine with friends at his favourite Marais bar, Le Croco. “I try not to be too uptight,” he says. “I don’t want to be at the end of my career, thinking I was too much about the ballet.” What will he do at 42, when étoiles are contractually obliged to retire? “I think I want to be a nurse,” he says. “Working in medicine has always been my dream, like ballet.”
In October, Diop will perform as a guest dancer in Gustavia at the Royal Swedish Opera, a new work about Gustav Badin, a West Indian slave adopted by the Queen of Sweden. It offers him a rare opportunity to craft a ballet from scratch with the choreographer Pär Isberg, while “putting the light on” an astonishing true story “of this prince who has been completely forgotten”. Rehearsals aren’t starting imminently though. Until then? “I’m gonna be sleeping!”