A fresh balletic take on this old tale of tragedy, and... SHAKESPEARE’S STORY GOES TO NEW HEIGHTS
Ican’t remember seeing a better Ballet Ireland production than this one, choreographed by the consistently impressive Morgann Runacre-Temple. I didn’t see the company’s 2010 production of the work, with the same choreographer, but I assume it was similar to this latest version.
It gives the story a modern update by having it set in a school where rowdy gangs are baiting and attacking each other.
The chaplain and a teacher decide to harness the groups’ violent tendencies by getting them involved in a production of Romeo and Juliet. It’s very similar to the West Side Story treatment of the play, essentially the Shakespearean tragedy without the fancy costumes. And it works beautifully, much better than the company’s revamped Giselle from last April which updated but didn’t improve the work.
The choreography is spare, without the set piece extravaganzas you normally get in large ballets, but the ensemble dancing is matched with great precision to Prokofiev’s dramatic music, and even varies in its detailed treatment of fights.
The result is a performance where nobody can hide, and concentration is totally on the characters and their situations. And it’s all done with the simplest of sets and excellent use of lighting.
When the young lovers first encounter each other in the dangerous situation where the Montague Romeo is a forbidden enemy in the Capulet household, there’s a magical moment when everyone else onstage freezes, and only the lovers move, as though they are living in a world apart. Their pas de deux, which ends the first section, is a breathless mixture of youthful passion, love and lust, and uncertainty on the part of Juliet, which develops as the ballet proceeds. This is sexuality dramatically alive without being explicit.
Ryoko Yagyu, as Juliet, once again shows how well she can blend dance with characterisation as a single action, right up to the tragic finale that demands great sensitivity if it’s not to look like pure melodrama.
She is superbly matched by Vincenzo Di Primo’s Romeo, as the two balance impassioned commitment with a distraught sense of despair.
It’s a ballet where dancers in lesser roles have plenty of opportunity to display their skills. Javio Monier gives Mercutio all the joviality and brashness of the Shakespearean character, and Sayako Tomiyoshi captures the feisty comic assurance of the nurse, while doubling as the teacher driven to distraction by her unruly young students.
Breathless mixture of passion, love and lust...this is sexuality dramatically alive without being explicit