Émilie Vasseur
Chief of International Dancer
Paris · Vienna
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The Company
Eighty-six dancers, twenty-seven nationalities, one artistic direction — and a rule that has not changed since the first season: nobody dances the same repertoire two years running.
1998 — today
From a rehearsal room above a Paris arcade to eleven opera houses.
It began with nine dancers, one borrowed studio and a conviction that has since cost us a great deal of sleep: that a European company should belong to no single country.
Bertrand Aumont founded Dance Europa in the autumn of 1998 with dancers from six countries and an agreement with the Palais Garnier for four nights a year. Three seasons later La Scala joined. Then Vienna, then Budapest. The network grew the way a répétiteur teaches a phrase — one house at a time, never faster than the dancers could absorb.
Today the company employs eighty-six permanent artists on identical contracts, whatever their passport or their city of residence. Everyone rehearses in the same three languages. Everyone is paid on the same scale. Everyone is expected, at least once a season, to dance a repertoire they did not choose.
Leadership
Émilie Vasseur
Chief of International Dancer
You do not run an international company from an office. You run it from stage left, three minutes before curtain, when nobody in the wings is speaking their mother tongue.
Émilie Vasseur trained at the Conservatoire in Lyon, then at the Vaganova Academy in Saint Petersburg, and danced twelve seasons — six of them as a principal — before moving to the other side of the curtain in 2019.
As Chief of International Dancer she is responsible for recruitment across all eleven houses, for casting every production of the season, and for the individual path of each of the company's eighty-six artists: their coaching, their visas, their injuries, their retirements. She sees roughly nine hundred auditions a year and remembers, colleagues insist, every single one.
- Joined the company
- 2011
- Appointed
- 2019
- Based in
- Paris · Vienna
- Working languages
- French · English · Russian · Italian
- Auditions seen in 2025
- 914
Who we are
Artistic & executive team
Sixteen people between the dancers and the world. Portraits by Anouk Vermeer, Berlin, 2026.
Isadora Lindqvist
Artistic Director
Stockholm
Matteo Ferranti
Resident Choreographer
Milan
Yuki Sanada
Ballet Mistress
Vienna
Amaury Okonkwo
Director of European Touring
Brussels
Leyla Demir
Head of New Work
Istanbul
Rafael Duarte
Principal Dancer
Lisbon
Hélène Marchetti
Director of the Academy
Lyon
Anton Weiss
Music Director
Dresden
Sofia Ricci
Principal Dancer
Naples
Bertrand Aumont
Founder & President
Paris
Nadia Belkacem
Director of Audiences
Marseille
Karim Bouzid
Technical Director
Paris
Camille Roussel
Head of Production
Geneva
Sasha Novák
Associate Choreographer
Prague
Lucas Berger
Assistant Ballet Master
Copenhagen
The dancers
Eighty-six
artists
Seven principals, twenty-two soloists, fifty-seven in the corps — plus eighteen dancers in the associate urban troupe. Contracts run for three seasons and are renewed by mutual agreement, never by audition.
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Principals
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Soloists
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Corps de ballet
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Auditions in 2025
Work with us
Auditions open in March
Open calls are held in Paris, Milan, Vienna and Copenhagen every spring, for dancers aged eighteen and over. Travel is reimbursed for every candidate invited to the second round.