ELLE Lithuania’s feature of Jean-Marc Puissant

ELLE Lithuania

By Reda Narmontė

June 2026

How Ballet Is Born

When the curtain rose on LNOBT’s Paquita premiere in April, Lithuania saw a new interpretation of this two-centuries-old Spanish classic. Set and costume designer Jean-Marc Puissant, who created the production’s visual world, says: “I am captivated by the work of the Vilnius craftsmen.”

Text by Reda Narmontė

A new interpretation of a classic

In creating Paquita for the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Paris-trained, London-based French designer was not content with simply another reconstruction of this classical ballet. Together with choreographer and former Paris Opera Ballet étoile Manuel Legris and librettist Jean-François Vazelle, the creative team made the bold decision to shift the story forward a century — from the original 1750s to the 1850s.

“It’s a thrilling idea, because it lets us anchor the action in a specific historical place — the inauguration of the Isabella II Bridge in Seville,” the designer explains. This period was not chosen at random — it is the height of the industrial revolution, the era of iron construction, and a moment of strong political ties between Spain and France.

“The 1850s fascinate me endlessly. Did you know the jewels recently stolen from the Louvre belonged to the French Empress Eugénie? She was a Spanish princess who married Napoleon III. These historical touchpoints serve as starting points for me in building a visual language. But my work is not museum reconstruction. My mission as a theatre designer is to help reveal the text, the choreography, and the performer. My goal is to tell the story of Paquita in a way that lets a contemporary audience — used to the visual richness and precision of high-end Netflix productions like The Crown or Bridgerton — feel a direct connection to what’s happening onstage. We’re chasing that same sense of precision, filtered through a modern lens and adapted for the stage and for ballet.” Paquita is the third full-length narrative ballet whose visual world Puissant has created in recent years.

The ingredients of stage language

When one person is responsible for both set and costume design, they become something like a god of visual storytelling. “I approach scenography the way a chef approaches a kitchen: I treat the space as the plate, and each design element — the sets and the costumes — as what’s served on it. Sometimes you want the plate itself to leave the visual impression while its contents stay simple, and sometimes it’s the reverse. But the genre and technique of ballet dictate their own rules. Everything here revolves around movement and body proportion. My personal aim as a designer is to create a strong sense of time, place, atmosphere, and emotion — without cluttering the space with unnecessary detail.”

One of the designer’s secrets is the careful selection of textures and fabrics so that, once onstage, they move with plasticity and catch the light beautifully. Working in the Vilnius opera house’s workshops alongside his Lithuanian colleagues, he spent months searching for the right materials for the costumes alone. “Social status onstage has to read instantly, without a single word. It also matters whether I’m designing a corps de ballet as a single visual block — like the swans in Swan Lake — or whether I want each character rendered as an individual, which is how I’ll reveal the Roma community in Paquita. Even where silhouettes are similar, the fabrics and colours must differ.”

In preparing for Paquita, the designer didn’t limit himself to costume history references. He also researched the history and architecture of Seville and the political climate of the 1850s in depth. In his London studio, his research into nineteenth-century Seville took physical form: every selected visual idea was printed and pinned to walls and boards, eventually developing into three-dimensional models for each scene and costume sketches for every character in the production. “In theory everything always works, but it’s only once you set the ideas in front of you that you see the real picture. Again, it’s like cooking — you can imagine a certain spice will be perfect in a dish, but until you taste it alongside all the other ingredients, you don’t know the truth. I needed to see those figures from old paintings as small printed cut-outs in my model to know I was on the right path. I’m often surprised by what, and who, actually belongs together.”

Inspired by Lithuanian craftsmen

While creating Paquita, the designer spends several weeks a month in Vilnius, his days divided between set work, costume work, technical meetings, and pure creative time. “I start my day at nine. No — really, my day starts at three in the morning, when I wake up gripped by mild panic, wondering if I’ve forgotten something or made the right call on some detail (laughs). I jot the idea down, then at nine I plan the day, and at ten I arrive at the theatre to start work with the teams.”

Has he managed to discover Vilnius at this pace? “Not really, so far. In January it was bitterly cold here, but just watching the light on the snow in Vilnius’s Old Town was magical. I like places that knock me a little out of my own head. There’s a restaurant-bar, Brūkšlis, for instance — Saturdays they have DJ parties that bring a completely different energy after a long day with fabric swatches. I’m looking forward to spring, when I can really explore the city.”

Jean-Marc doesn’t hide his admiration for the savoir-faire of Lithuanian craftsmen. “The tailors, master craftsmen, and costume production heads at the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre carry an enormous depth of knowledge and extraordinary skill, honed over decades of practice. That’s an invaluable luxury, and I’m genuinely learning a great deal from your masters. I’m a guest in their house, and I deeply value our daily collaboration. What audiences will see onstage is their work — I hope they’ll be proud of it.”

Costume vs. fashion

Although he designs costumes for the great stages of Europe, America, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, Jean-Marc’s own relationship with fashion is unexpectedly personal, almost philosophical. He doesn’t consider himself a conventional follower of fashion, but his wardrobe speaks to a deep loyalty to certain aesthetic principles. As he tells it, his deeper interest in how he dresses began almost by accident, with a Yohji Yamamoto coat his mother bought him for his eighteenth birthday.

“It was unlike anything I was wearing at the time, but my mother and I saw it in the shop window and fell for it instantly. I still have that coat, and I still wear it. It’s an object with a soul. And when I started working intensively in Japan in 2018, I realised that the Japanese designers who brought their ‘anti-fashion’ concept to Paris in the eighties are the ones closest to me: Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons. Today I’m drawn to the idea of buying clothes that will last thirty or forty years. Now I mostly choose their pieces, building a kind of uniform for myself. I round it out with basics from Uniqlo or Muji, and add a personal touch with worn and vintage pieces, some of which came from my father and grandfather.”

Black, white, neutral tones, indigo, and the occasional bold, monolithic block of colour — that’s how the designer dresses today. “I follow fashion only as much as my work requires — enough to know, as a costume designer, what the fashion world is doing today. For me personally, clothes are a source of inner energy. I choose them depending on what kind of day I expect, or what kind of day I want. It’s like food: some days you need protein, or something rich and sweet, and other days something light and calming. Because of work I’m often far from home, so clothes help me feel at home, comfortable in my own skin, wherever I am.”

Who needs good taste, anyway

“I genuinely couldn’t care less about so-called ‘good taste.’ The very idea of ‘good taste,’ or even a hint of it, is often a warning sign to me. I don’t believe there’s some universal gold standard — and even if there were, I wouldn’t care. Creation is a personal matter, and especially in theatre, what ultimately works is always the result of collaboration. What matters most is the ability to ask questions and to talk. I’d even say ‘bad taste’ can be fantastic! It all comes down to proportion and nerve. It’s like swearing — if you’re sterile all the time, it’s boring, but if you drop the right word at the right moment, it gives everything a sense of truth and a dash of humour. There are no limits, as long as you know why you’re crossing them.”

“Creation should be an endless playground where you keep asking yourself: ‘That looked good yesterday — but does it still make sense today?’ Otherwise your art freezes and dies.”

Walking out into the snow-covered streets of Vilnius after the interview, the designer is already planning tomorrow’s fittings. His Paquita is not just a historical narrative built around the opening of a bridge in Seville, but also an artistic bridge between classical ballet mastery and contemporary aesthetic refinement. Top-tier artistic achievement, built by world-class talent — LNOBT’s Paquita, on stage since this April.