Juliet & Romeo by National Ballet of Canada
Review by Anar M., Youth Reviewer
**Trigger warning: suicide
Recently, I went to see the National Ballet of Canada’s production of Prokofiev’s ballet of “Romeo & Juliet”. It’s directed by Hope Muir, and was choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky in 2011. I don’t know a lot about ballet as an art form, but I was astonished at how moved I was by a performance that has no words.
I really liked how much the dancers were able to communicate through their movements. There was definitely humour — Mercutio flirting with Juliet’s nurse, for instance, mirrors similar scenes in the original play remarkably well — but also more complex emotions. When Romeo has been banished and Lord and Lady Capulet are trying to convince Juliet to marry Paris, Juliet (Chelsy Meiss) dances a sequence that conveys her desperation and the way that everyone has turned on her and rejected her. Later, after she has planned with Friar Lawrence to fake her death, she has a second dance sequence with her father and Paris. In this one, she allows Paris to dance with her, but is entirely passive and immobile while Paris and her father move her around. I thought Juliet, in her stillness, looked almost like a corpse — a wordless foreshadowing of the end.
But the most heart-wrenching scene is the final one, in which Romeo (Ben Rudinsin) finds Juliet apparently dead and drinks poison in order to join her. Here, the performance diverges from Shakespeare’s play: Juliet wakes up from her false death before the poison has taken effect, and she and Romeo dance together one last time before he dies. Again, I was taken aback by the emotional power of the scene; I don’t know how the credit is divided between Prokofiev’s music, Ratmansky’s choreography, Muir’s directing, or Meiss and Rudinsin’s dancing, but the effect was sublime.
Aside from that change to the plot of the play, the ballet included several references to specific pieces of the text. For example, In the play’s opening scene, two Capulets provoke a Montague: “I will bite my thumb at them, which is a disgrace to them if they bear it.” In the ballet’s first scene, one dancer bit his thumb at another. I noticed several more, and suspect that there are still more references I just didn’t catch.
There are more aspects of the performance that I liked. Prokofiev’s music was fantastic — there was a lot of percussion, sometimes joined by stomping or clapping of the dancers or even (during fight scenes) clashing swords. Mercutio (Donald Thom) was impressive, both because of his humour and his final dance scene, during which his dance somehow manages to show that he is injured, while also conveying the half-joking, half-despairing feeling of the play (“’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow / and you shall find me a grave man”).
In short, the ballet is both beautiful and emotional to watch. I haven’t seen many ballets before this one, but maybe I’ll have to change that.