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Mathias Heymann (1987– ) is a French dancer. He is a star dancer (an etoile) at the Paris Opera Ballet.

Origins
Heymann was born 1 October 1987 in Marseille. He is the son of a French mathematics teacher and an oriental dancer. Since his mother was from Morocco, where his father got a job, Mathias spent the first nine years of his childhood in Morocco, Senegal and Djibouti.

The beginnings
Returning to France in 1997, at the age of ten, he began dancing in Marseille, his hometown, in the Attitude Dance Academy of Véronique Sottile. Following the advice of Sottile, he participated in the Youth America Grand Prix at age 13, where he won a scholarship to a dance class in Miami. He was later admitted aged 14 to the Dance School of the Paris Opera Ballet.

Dance School
By a series of happy coincidences Heymann was admitted in 2001 to the Dance School of the Paris Opera Ballet. When he took a dance class at the Dance School, his father met Elisabeth Platel in the hallway. She informed him that to become a dancer his son was already old. But thanks to a video that his father sent, without the knowledge of his son, to the director of the School of Dance and because a position had become vacant, Heymann entered the Dance School at the last moment as a paying student.

At the end of his schooling, Heymann won the role of Daphnis when the School of Dance presented Daphnis and Chloe on the stage of the Opera Garnier.

At the ballet of the Paris Opera
Enlisted in 2004 in the Paris Opera Ballet's corps, he was noticed very early, and given small solo roles. In his second year, he was promoted to coryphée, having danced variations from Don Quixote and Marco Spada. He was made subjét in December 2006 after dancing variations from Swan Lake and Don Quixote. The year after, dancing extracts of La Bayadère and Arepo by Maurice Béjart, he reached the rank of premier danseur.

Mathias Heymann regards Manuel Legris as his mentor. Legris travelled the world with a group of protégés, "Manuel Legris et ses Étoiles." This concept was born in 1996 with the collaboration of Manuel Legris and Monique Loudières. Their purpose was to allow young dancers to approach solo roles still inaccessible to them at the Opera, and to enable them to work with living choreographers.

The group was regularly invited to Japan and Australia. As well as Heymann, it included Dorothée Gilbert and Mathieu Ganio, Hervé Moreau, Mathilde Froustey and Eleonora Abbagnato.


 * Manuel quickly spotted me and gave me the opportunity to dance during his tours in Japan. Very rewarding experiences that allowed me to confront another audience; that too is part of the job of dancer. He also taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade: the maintenance behind partners for example. In fact, just by watching Manuel dance we learn a lot. He is a very generous person. I remember working sessions during which he had perspired more than me as he had invested in the exercise! Humanly speaking, I appreciate him very much, his is an extremely touching and endearing personality.

On April 16, 2009, at the age of 21, Heymann was named étoile (star dancer) at the end of the first performance of John Cranko's Onegin, as was Isabelle Ciaravola. So it was as a star that he took part in the grand parade of 15 May in honour of Manuel Legris, who bad farewell to the stage that evening.

Influences
Mathias Heymann finds inspiration watching videos of the great male dancers he loves: Rudolf Nureyev, Vladimir Vasiliev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

He was very touched when he saw The Dying Swan at Covent Garden, where the performance by Uliana Lopatkina "marked me for life". At the Paris Opera itself Heymann has always loved the work of the étoile Elisabeth Maurin.

Manuel Legris supported him a lot while he was injured and Laurent Hilaire stood in for him during rehearsals for Giselle.

Injury
At the end of 2011 Mathias Heymann had to suspend his career for 18 months because of a tibial fatigue fracture. He had ignored it since his teenage years, since in the hierarchy of the ballet of the Paris National Opera he had been promoted every year to a higher grade. He consulted twenty doctors in vain. Six months of interruption of all dance activities achieved nothing. A colleague advised him to give up pursuing a career.

Finally Heymann met Federico Bonelli, a dancer in the Royal Ballet. Bonelli had had a similar injury healed by an operation. Heymann underwent the same operation by the same surgeon, with rehabilitation first in London and then at l’Hôpital des gardiens de la paix in Paris and in Capbreton. The outcome was favourable. On 6 March 2013 Heymann returned to the stage on the occasion of the tribute to Rudolf Nureyev with a solo that was a concentration of ardor and passion. David Mead in a review of the night's DVD wrote:


 * Best of all, though, and rather appropriately, is a male solo. Heymann’s performance of Nureyev’s Manfred (a ballet about the poet Byron to Tchaikovsky) is the one dance where a sense of [Nureyev] the great man really comes through. Heymann is incredibly expressive in face and body. The emotion is there for all to see from the moment he explodes into action. He deserves every second of his extended ovation.

Style
In his solos, Mathias Heymann excels in lightness.

Film
In Aurélie Dupont, l'espace d'un instant by Cédric Klapisch (2010) Heymann is filmed during rehearsals with Aurélie Dupont.

Roles danced
Don Quixote: Basilio

Paquita: Lucien

La dame aux Camélias: Des Grieux

La fille mal guardée: Colas

The Children of Paradise: Baptist

Mahler's Third Symphony: The War God

Onegin: Lenski

Giselle: Albrecht, a farmer

Cinderella: a friend of the actor, a dancer of the film

The Four Temperaments: Melancholic

The Spectre of the Rose: the Spectre

Suite en blanc: varied theme, mazurka

The Nutcracker: Drosselmeyer

In the night: 1st step of two

La Bayadère: the Golden Idol, Solor

Kaguya-hime: a villager

The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan

Swan Lake: Siegfried

Caligula: Incitatus

Coppelia: Frantz

Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio

The Anatomy of sensation

La Source: Zael

Sleeping Beauty: Prince Désiré

Awards
In 2007, Mathias Heymann won the Carpeaux Circle Award and the AROP Award with Sarah Kora Dayanova.

In 2012 he won the Benois Prize for dance.

Mau Mau rebellion
Lennox-Boyd was Minister of State for the colonies 1951–52, making his first visit to Kenya in 1952. Kenya was governed by Sir Evelyn Baring through regulations promulgated under emergency powers. The policing of those powers was in the hands of General George Erskine, commander in chief of East Africa Command. Their War Council included the deputy governor and a representative of the white settlers but of no other social, racial or tribal group.

In 1954 Lennox-Boyd was made Colonial Secretary. Lennox-Boyd's early hands-on visit to Kikuyu South Nyeri in the Kikuyu reseerves, for instance, was accompanied by Baring and Erskine. They had a lengthy meeting with Chief Mundia. The Chief and his Home Guards were charged with beating several detainees, one of whom died. Baring quietly suggested to the assistant police commissioner that it would be politically inexpedient to prosecute such a loyal ally. But dropping the charges offended the impartiality of Colonel Arthur Young, the new chief commissioner. Informed of Young's intention to resign on principle, Lennox-Boyd persuaded Young to reduce his objection to a "difference of opinion", thus leaving Baring and Erskine's manoeuvre in place and Lennox-Boyd's reputation untouched. Supporters of Young were subsequently encouraged to take jobs outside Kenya.

In 1954 Lennox-Boyd was made Colonial Secretary. In June 1957 he received a secret memorandum written by Eric Griffiths-Jones, the attorney general of Kenya. The letter described the abuse of Mau Mau detainees. The memorandum was passed on by Baring, who is alleged to have added a covering letter asserting that inflicting "violent shock" was the only way to deal with Mau Mau insurgents. It is clear from Hansard reports of Lennox-Boyd's answers to questions in the House of Commons that Lennox-Boyd entirely supported the Baring–Erskine regime and the attitudes that went with it.

The hermetic seal on the flow of information about Kenya was blown by Barbara Castle, who made her own visit to Kenya for the Daily Mail and subsequently reported to the House on the government's failure to recognize "that the Africans are human beings with fundamental human rights as people".

There seems to be no evidence that Lennox-Boyd then or later supported the movement towards independence of Kenya. From his earliest years in politics he had openly admired the fascist dictators; reluctantly accepted democracy in Britain; supported the Empire as a natural expression of racial superiority in an unequal world. Later joining the Monday Club was of a piece with rejecting Macmillan's adjustment of Conservatism to a post-colonial future. In April 2011, a Guardian report described a cache of government documents which might indicate that, despite clear briefings, Lennox-Boyd repeatedly denied that the abuses were happening, and publicly denounced those colonial officials who came forward to complain. The cache, along with interviews with survivors, became the basis of Catherine Elkins's Britain's Gulag: the brutal end of empire in Kenya.