It could have gone so, so wrong. A French Baroque opera that puts an aesthetic gloss on colonial encounters, refitted with street choreography: a recipe for awkwardness, at best. That it was instead one of the freshest, most charismatic and poignant performances I’ve ever seen speaks to the conceptual focus of Clément Cogitore, an artist and filmmaker making his debut as a stage director, and Bintou Dembélé, a pioneer od French hip-hop dance (and to the keen instincts of Stéphane Lissner, the leader of the Paris Opera, where I saw it in October). The cast of singers and dancers was superb, led vibrantly by the conductor Leonardo García Alarcón and his Cappella Mediterranea ensemble.