On September 15th, the Paris Opera opened a third stage — this time, a little different and in keeping with our times. The company’s ‘3rd Stage’ project refers to its new online platform, featuring works by filmmakers, choreographers, visual artists, directors, and writers with a new, fesh perspective on the history of the Paris Opera as well as the arts of opera and ballet in general. To mark the launch of this new stage, sixteen short films have been created and published on the website, one of them being 'Matching Numbers' by French artist Xavier Veilhan. The film’s title refers to the term used by vintage car collectors to describe an automobile whose core components (engine, transmission, chassis etc.) have the same serial number as the car they are part of, making it a vehicle that is truly original and thus of higher value. Spring-boarding from this concept that a car’s authenticity rests not on its exterior appearance but on the nature of its internal components, Veilhan draws a double portrait of the Bastille and Garnier theatres, avoiding the usual glamorous imagery associated with them. Instead, he prefers to take us behind the scenes, exploring the gritty and mechanistic aspects of each theatre, drawing a dramatic comparison of scale between the architecture, the human body and the surrounding city.

The visual journey in ‘Matching Numbers’ takes us into the darkest corners of the two buildings, one such example being the Palais Garnier’s mysterious underground cistern — a feature that gave rise to several myths and even found its way into Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera. Veilhan’s film is also a spectacular (if not somewhat flaunting) display of the two theatres’ machinery and technical equipment , including the vast rotating stage of the Bastille theatre —which, as the director demonstrates, is big enough for a small airplane or two— and its state-of-the-art lighting rig. From moving platforms to swinging lights and a gigantic orb flying over the auditorium, Veilhan creates a choreography especially for machines, as if the theatre apparatus has come to life, to dance for us.