“To move is to stir”: Romeo and Juliet in Contemporary Ballet
“Juliet, the dice were loaded from the start…
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?”
In a twist on the traditional telling of the familiar scene, film director Baz Luhrmann staged Romeo’s death at the moment of Juliet’s awakening. Rather than Juliet coming to an understanding of what occurred in the discovery of his death, Luhrmann instead displays a horrifying moment of recognition between them as Romeo dies and Juliet is reborn. That scene, however it is staged, and however often, stings. Hurtling toward the inevitable conclusion of their deaths, the familiar story of Romeo and Juliet makes one ache. If only. Luhrmann, like other artists, filmmakers and choreographers, plays with convention in the telling of the story. For contemporary ballet choreographer Edward Clug, that narrative instance became the seed for exploration in his telling of the familiar tale (2). Starting with Juliet finding Romeo dead beside her, the ballet unfurls as a memory. How Juliet arrives to the unavoidable ending shifts from the conclusion to the beginning of the story. In an interview, Clug commented, “I developed the ballet as a prolongation of that moment. What would have happened if Juliet didn’t take her own life?”
In this essay, I explore two contemporary ballet productions of Romeo and Juliet, Clug’s Radio and Juliet (2005) and Joëlle Bouvier’s Romeo and Juliet (2009). I argue that contemporary ballet versions of Romeo and Juliet both allude to and elude the conventions of classical ballet: narratively, choreographically, and in the dancing itself. Certainly, part of the success of contemporary dance versions lies in the sheer number of traditionally danced Romeo and Juliets, as well as the audience’s familiarity with the Shakespearean play. An analysis of the dances themselves demonstrates the mediation of textual elements by the dancing bodies and addresses the ways in which meaning can be made through choreographed action.
In these two ballets, the character of and choreography for Juliet exemplifies a balance between innovation and tradition.
I began thinking about Juliet and her narrative function after seeing hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris’s evening length work Rome and Jewels (2000), performed by his company Rennie Harris/Puremovement. Most choreographers who stage Romeo and Juliet are steeped in the traditions of European-American theatrical dance. Harris’s version comes from an entirely other tradition. Harris’s work is theatrical dance based in street forms of African American hip hop styles, including stepping, popping, animation, locking, electric boogie, breaking, hip hop, and house. When Harris began working on Rome and Jewels, his original concept was to update West Side Story. When the piece was in process, they used Leonard Bernstein’s music. As it developed they moved farther away from West Side Story and closer to the original text by Shakespeare. Harris came to realize how much the play itself connected with his own experience. As he explained: “How brilliant is it to write plays that covers every possible scenario, experience, and situation that presents itself in life?(3)" He goes on to point out that to his contemporaries, Shakespeare was a man of the people, not accepted by the elite. It is only over the centuries that his position has been elevated. Harris approaches the familiar tale in a different way. He uses the narrative expectations brought into the theatre by the audience to make connections to other kinds of stories, and to make the known unfamiliar.
While Harris’s background is not in the traditions of theatrical dance, he brings a contemporary choreographic sensibility to the staging of Rome and Jewels, shown in his characterizations, the overall structuring of the piece, and by the inclusion of spoken text. Most pertinent to this discussion is that rather than an actual, corporeal Juliet, the character of Jewels is an apparition. There is no performer who dances the role. The audience creates a version of Jewels based on their own experiences and the perception of women as seen through the eyes of the male characters. As a feminist and dance scholar, I was stunned by Harris’s choice to not have a dancer perform Jewels. The character exists, her story is told, she’s just not there. Harris’s choice is a dramatic contrast to every other dance production of Romeo and Juliet.
The part of Juliet is a treasured role for ballerinas; she is a great dramatic and dynamic character. Over the course of the story, Juliet transforms from child to woman, displaying great passion and great sorrow. Margot Fonteyn, Carla Fracci, Galina Ulanova, and Gelsey Kirkland have all danced the role to great critical and audience acclaim. For the ballerina to perform the emotional content of the very young Juliet paradoxically takes years of experience on stage. Of particular interest here is the way the character of Juliet, as well as the role for the ballerina/dancer, redefines the two works, the aforementioned Radio and Juliet (2005) danced by the Slovenian company Ballet Maribor and Joelle Bouvier’s Romeo and Juliet (2009), commissioned Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, or Ballet Genève.
My consideration of Juliet is part of a larger project that examines the ways in which Shakespearean plays serve as inspiration for choreographers working in a variety of concert dance forms from modern dance and ballet, to hip hop and Broadway. The resulting dances have varying degrees of correspondence to the original source material, some portraying full and specific narratives, such as David Gordon’s Dancing Henry Five (2004), other dances distill the stories to evoke characters and conflict, like José Limón’s Moor’s Pavane (1949) and Doug Elkins’s Mo(or)town Redux (2012)—both inspired by Othello.
A variety of methodologies have led me to this point. I mention them here to provide a sense of the shifting approaches that this subject deserves. First and foremost, I have watched multiple versions of the same story in performance and on video. Romeo and Juliet can be told and danced in a multitude of ways. Dance scholar Vida L. Midgelow’s book Reworking the Ballet: Counter-Narratives and Alternative Bodies has been a critical source for considering what would appear to be the same dance. As Midgelow defines it, “Choreographers of reworkings have contradicted, criticized, dislocated, fragmented, updated, celebrated, refocused and otherwise reimagined the ballet on stage.(4)” Hence, while we can think that there is only one Romeo and Juliet, each dance can actually be quite different from others.
I have also conducted numerous interviews – with choreographers, dancers, and artistic directors about Romeo and Juliet in my role as Scholar in Residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival(5). With the insight of those kinds of experts, I have considered pivotal and driving points of action, such as the masked ball, the balcony scene, and the fight in the marketplace. And, further, what styles of movement evoke what kinds of feelings, what music is best, what characters are critical, and what is the importance of the story itself.
Theatre scholar Alan Hagar contends that Romeo and Juliet is virtually commonplace:
“By 1990, general knowledge of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had become almost universal. Popular culture indicated that it was one of the world’s favorite stories. In the age of international English, a ‘romeo’ had become a common term meaning ‘serial lover.’ Rock and roll songs…proclaimed [their] love, newspaper headlines and editorials referred to the vendetta (and love in the play) as common knowledge. Romeo and Juliet became the symbols for the letters R and J in the new international alphabetic code… (6)”
Alpha, Bravo, Romeo, Juliet.
The vast number of Romeo and Juliet productions on the concert dance stage certainly supports Hagar’s point. In fact, there are so many dance versions of Romeo and Juliet that Lewis Segal, longtime dance critic for the Los Angeles Times, called it “the warm-weather Nutcracker.” Among the well known and highly regarded are ballets by Frederick Ashton, John Cranko, Kenneth Macmillan, Anthony Tudor, Maurice Béjart. Mark Morris. Jerome Robbins, who went on to create his Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story, danced the role of Benvolio in the Tudor ballet. For the 1938 film The Goldwyn Follies George Balanchine staged a production with tap-dancing Capulets and toe-dancing Montagues, with an unusual twist of a happy ending (7).
Why have there been so many versions? Dance historian Rita Felciano argues that since the ballet is based on a “well-known literary masterpiece, choreographers can go back to a renewable source artistic inspiration. (8)” In other words, rather than simply considering other versions of danced Romeo and Juliets, choreographers can read the play or look at any of the dozens of movies that have been inspired by the story.
In The Shakespeare Bulletin, humanities scholar Robin Wharton argues that the audience’s knowledge going in to the theatre assists in the choreographic innovation. She states: “Turning to Shakespeare, of course, permits a choreographer to take advantage of an audience’s presumed familiarity with the plot to introduce a previously unavailable level of narrative complexity. (9)” Wharton goes on to assert, following dance critic Clive Barnes and others, that the narrative is only one element that choreographers contend with; they also contend with the element of the ballet itself—its history, the movement vocabulary, and the dancing itself (10).
Vincenzo Galeotti staged the earliest known ballet about Romeo and Juliet in 1811 in Copenhagen (11). What we know about it is from August Bournonville’s My Life in Theatre in which he describes Galeotti’s strategies to make sure the audience could follow the plot. Bournonville reported: “The pantomime, according to Italian form, consisted of a complete dictionary of accepted gestures (that had been gathered from Roman and Neapolitan folkways) and also, to lend greater clarity to the whole, of written placards, tablets, banners, and transparencies which (like the Ninevite flame-writing of old) announced fateful occurrences. (12)” I mention Galeotti’s version not simply for the historical record, but because of Bournonville’s description. To make the story clear to the early 19th c. audience, Galeotti employed to repeat “a dictionary of accepted gestures” and “placards” announcing events. While many choreographers have striven to maintain that specificity of plot and character, Bouvier and Clug have more open approaches to the story (13).
French choreographer Joëlle Bouvier was commissioned specifically by Ballet Genève to make Romeo and Juliet. The artistic director selected Bouvier to choreograph based on her Joan of Arc (14). Bouvier’s Romeo and Juliet finds inspiration in the story and Prokofiev’s music. However, she was not interested in the specificity of place and time, or the weight of the full Prokofiev score. She chose instead to choreograph to excerpts of three of his “Suites for Orchestra” and, as she put it, focusing her research on the crux of the drama. The narrative is present, but it’s evoked and suggested, rather than made explicit. Bouvier felt that the audience all already knew the story.
Danced by 22 dancers, the work opens with Romeo and Juliet dressed in light colors manipulated by the rest of the dancers in black, bringing to mind two different things. The first is bunraku, a Japanese form of puppetry, in which three puppeteers manipulate each puppet. One controls the right arm and the upper part of the body, another the left arm, and the third makes the puppet walk. However, the puppeteers go virtually unnoticed by the audience, since their role is to animate the puppets, not draw attention to themselves. Second, the dark-clothed dancers can be seen the Fates or the gods who deal action dealt on humans.
In the scene at the ball, Bouvier uses visual counterpoint to indicate who belongs with whom, rather than specify who is a Capulet or Montague. Simple strategies of staging to keep the warring groups separate from each other. She employs great sweeping movements to wash across the stage when the company dances in unison or in canon. The corps de ballet are not only women but men and women dancing a shared movement vocabulary together.
In building the dance, Bouvier toyed with the idea of naming the work Juliet and Romeo to call attention to the perspective she was taking in character development. Ultimately, she decided not to. As she explained it, she was inspired by the timelessness of the plot, explaining the continual relevance of Romeo and Juliet in this way:
“How many wars in the world today reflect the tragedy of Shakespeare? This is why I chose not to situate my story in a precise time. For the scenery and costumes, we will remain timeless, because this story takes place, has taken place and has yet to take place everywhere. (15)”
In Radio and Juliet, choreographer Clug foregrounded Juliet’s character and her action in the narrative. Juliet is the sole woman on stage, joined by six men. There is no one man who is Romeo, or Tybalt, or Friar Lawrence. They move in and out of the characters, with only Juliet fully realized. Not only does this make her character pivotal to the action of the story, it also contends with the tradition of the corps de ballet, with its often anonymous group of women. The production is spare, without the lavish sets and costumes of many productions of Romeo and Juliet. The courtship is there, the masked ball is there, as is the ferocity of battle. But all of it is more abstracted than specific. Gone, too, are the crowds, and characters that offer comic relief and secondary storylines.
Once the full-bodied dancing begins, there is no doubt of the assuredness of both the training of the dancers and the understanding they have for the story their dancing bodies tell. Clug winnowed down the familiar tale to essential elements. Juliet’s opening solo is contained, fraught with tension and inwardly coiled energy. The stage is hers alone. And she is perhaps alone in the world. The first Romeo swallows space with loose-limbed ease. When joined by other men, camaraderie and restless energy unite them with a uniform sense of speed and attack, assertive and powerful. What will it take to turn them from friendly competition to combative rivals?
As Juliet and the next Romeo gently touch, with actions that cause small, inescapable reactions, their flirtation unfolds. Details of the black-suited man and white-corseted woman sharpen as they slice through the air—his hand on the small of her back, at the nape of her neck. It is tender without sentiment, raw without roughness. But no matter how intimate and personal their duet is, they will not be left alone. Within the new conventions Clug establishes, it makes perfect sense that multiple bodies portray the same characters.
What is it that is so captivating about the characters of Romeo and Juliet? Why do we all return to the story of the star-crossed lovers more than 400 years after they first appeared on the stage of the Globe with Shakespeare’s company of actors (16)? And what can we surmise about what Shakespeare might have thought about Clug and Bouvier and so many others tinkering with his timeless play? He probably would have delighted in their versions. As noted Shakespeare scholar Frank Kermode explains, the characters of Romeo and Juliet were well known when Shakespeare wrote his play in 1595.
Shakespeare’s direct source, according to Kermode, was a poem by Arthur Brooke, who in turn based his poem on a French prose novella by Boiastuau. Kermode dismisses Brooke’s 3,000 lines of poetry as a “very dull work.” Kermode’s analysis of the two texts side by side leads him to marvel at Shakespeare’s ability to “transform the tale into a dramatic action, altering and compressing to make a sharp theatrical point, telescoping events, expanding such characters as the Nurse and Mercutio, cutting material, and inventing new episodes.”
Contemporary ballet choreographers rely on the history of ballet and the strength of the movement tradition, without being confined by it. As can be seen in noteworthy contemporary versions of Romeo and Juliet, choreographers can simultaneously hint at and resist the familiar. By finding something new in the known, Clug and Bouvier offer new movement perspectives on an infamous tale.
Footnotes:
Mark Knopfler, Romeo and Juliet, The Dire Straits © 1980
Edward Clug, Romanian-born dancer and choreographer, is the Artistic Director of Ballet Maribor, the Slovenian ballet company.
Rennie Harris, Program essay for Rome and Jewels, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Massachusetts, August 2000.
Vida L. Midgelow. Reworking the Ballet: Counternarratives and Alternative Bodies, (New York: Routledge, 2007:1).
For example, I moderated a panel discussion called “Romeo and Juliet and Ballet” at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. The panelists were Ashley Wheater, Artistic Director of Joffrey Ballet and former principal with San Francisco Ballet among other companies; master teacher and former principal ballerina Anna Marie Holmes, the first North American invited to perform with the Kirov Ballet in Russia, and Philippe Cohen, the Artistic Director of Ballet Genève. “Romeo and Juliet and Ballet” PillowTalk series. Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Massachusetts, 23 June 2011.
Alan Hagar, Understanding Romeo and Juliet. (Greenwood Press, 1999: 183).
While this happy ending version seems ludicrous, in fact, in 1662, Shakespeare’s text was re-written by Sir James Howard to have a happy ending—in production, the happy ending nights alternated with the tragic ending.
Rita Felciano, “Romeo and Juliet.” The International Encyclopedia of Dance. ed. Selma Jean Cohen. (Oxford University Press, 1999: GIVE PAGE NUMBER OF ENTRY
Robin Wharton, “There are No Mothers-in-Law in Ballet.” Shakespeare Bulletin.
This interaction between multiple makers of meaning—the narrative and the dancing and the choreography—can be understood as a kind of intertextuality. See, for example, Janet Lansdale, “Intertextual Narratives in Dance Analysis.” Decentering Dancing Texts: The Challenge of Interpreting Dances. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, “Trans-formal Translation: Plays into Ballets.” The Yearbook of English Studies Vol. 36, No. 1 (2006): 70.
Bournonville, My Theatre Life as quoted in Edgecombe, “Trans-formal Translation: Plays into Ballets” (70).
In her work, Midgelow similarly selected dances, “that might broadly be perceived to depart from a source text (or texts) in order to give rise to a new dance that has a significantly different resonance, while evoking a purposeful extended and intertextual relationship with that source” (3).
Joëlle Bouvier, Jeanne d’Arc (2003) with the Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN) Ballet de Lorraine. Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN)—B allet de Lorraine.
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Press Release, Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, June 2011.
Romeo and Juliet was first performed in 1595.
Originally published:
Network of pointes.
ed Jill Nunes Jensen and Kathrina Farrugia-KrielPublisher:
Birmingham, Alabama : Society of Dance History Scholars, 2015
Series: Conversations across the field of dance studies, volume 35.