How does one take a classic literary work shaped by poetry and weave it into movement? How can you craft a physical manifestation of a character’s declarative words and let their psychological complexities dwell in every step? If there was never a tale of more woe than that of Juliet and her Romeo, never was there a rendering more profoundly human than Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette. Known for his minimalistic reimagining of classical ballets, the French-born artistic director of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo premiered his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in December 1996 in Monaco. When the company toured the production in 1999, Peter Boal, then a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, caught a glimpse of Roméo et Juliette at New York City Center and, astonished by its brilliance, decided that someday, if ever he became an artistic director, he would program it. Just months after stepping into the role of artistic director at Pacific Northwest Ballet in 2005, he began the process of replacing Kent Stowell’s Prokofiev-less version of Romeo and Juliet with Maillot’s. Three years later, Pacific Northwest Ballet became the first company in the United States to perform Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette. Although its premiere did not come without backlash – from a generation reluctant to see a modern interpretation brought into the repertory – it quickly became a beloved, integral part of PNB’s identity and continues to serve as an example of Boal’s courageous artistic leadership.
Seventeen years after its Pacific Northwest Ballet premiere, Maillot’s bold voice still takes the centuries-old story and presents a vision so vividly his own that the story’s end is forgotten until it unravels before us. It’s not ballet trying to tell a story but rather, humanity coming forward through a visceral medium. With each gesture and breath steeped in meaning, Maillot distills the story to its essence by stripping the stage of non-essential characters, props, historical landmarks, and elaborate finery, bringing instead, elements of fate and foreshadowing to the forefront. What blossoms from such minimalism is a masterpiece: a fully realized portrait of human motivations, desires, and desperation.
Reflecting on Roméo et Juliette in 2008, Maillot claimed, “It’s connected to our ways. It’s connected to the reality of the world today… it’s pure enough that it doesn’t impose a point of view. It gives you the chance… to steal what you see and to make it yours” (Manes, 2011). Maillot’s vision for his Roméo et Juliette was inspired by cinematic principles, particularly by what Franco Zeffirelli achieved in his 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. This inspiration brings the elements of opening credits, fade-ins, still frames, slow motion, near oblivion of the audience, and the psychological and emotional complexity not typically seen in classical ballets.
Unlike the classics of the 19th century, such as Giselle, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty, there is no original, treasured choreography for Romeo and Juliet that has appeared throughout history in various adaptations. There is nothing to compare to the recognizable moments from these classics such as Swan Lake’s Four Little Swans, or The Sleeping Beauty’s Rose Adagio that carry across different stagings and interpretations. Even Sergei Prokofiev’s score has not cemented itself in every production of the ballet. While the score was commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre in 1935, it was deemed undanceable and overly complicated. As a result, Prokofiev’s score didn’t make its premiere until 1940 in Czechoslovakia in a production of the ballet by Leonid Larovsky for the Kirov Ballet. It was this production that caused Romeo and Juliet to become an international success, astonishing audiences with the depth of dramatic intensity that could be conveyed through ballet.
In 1954, the Kirov Ballet produced a narrated film utilizing Larovsky’s choreography that sent British and American audiences swooning for a ballet that was unlike anything they had seen before. In the wake of this adoration, choreographers strove to fulfill their own audience’s desire for the drama of Romeo and Juliet, including, most prominently, John Cranko’s production for the Stuttgart Ballet in 1962, and Kenneth MacMillan’s for The Royal Ballet in 1965. Though the interpretation of music, character, and tone vary across classical renditions of Romeo and Juliet, they all have one thing in common: full Renaissance garb and clashing swords. Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette has neither.
There is beauty in simplicity. Costumes by Jérôme Kaplan only vaguely hint at days past, yet, in silhouette and hue, give us a timeless sense of each character. In the absence of grand Renaissance architecture, the curtain’s ascent reveals a setting where anything might happen: a white expanse painted by the depth of color and texture of Dominique Drillot’s richly poetic lighting. Maillot trusts his audience to see what he leaves bare. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s curved white walls and sleek ramp move to create clean, layered outlines of scenes, shaping the spaces the story inhabits without intruding on movement’s purity. Upon this bare canvas, the mood of Drillot’s lighting sings, letting the balcony pas de deux float into an otherworldly, hazy, lavender blue, where Romeo and Juliet weave such intuitive, authentic passion that the rest of the world falls away.
Shakespeare’s plot may be dependent on sword wounding, yet Maillot uses props sparingly, and when they do appear, it is often in the form of textiles: the Nurse’s beloved cloth, the draped bedroom sheets that are pulled away like hope itself, the blood-soaked cloth which smothers Tybalt, and the haunting scarlet strip drawn from Romeo’s fatality. In keeping with Maillot’s focus on the smallest of gestures that become symbolic within his language, the violence of weaponry is replaced by the violence of hands.
By freeing himself from the expectations of classical ballet vocabulary, Maillot brings each character to life with a striking physicality. Romeo’s pure soul and youthful eagerness abound through each exuberantly poetic limb, while Juliet’s all silken sly wit and strong will. The Nurse’s warm temperament lies grounded in her heels, and as her perfect foil, Lady Capulet’s striking command and serpentine regality resound in every cold gesture. Mercutio and Benvolio retain Shakespeare’s humor through flights of immature fancy, contrasting the poor Friar Laurence who stands contorted in agony by the weight of the story he must carry.
The role that Friar Laurence plays is utterly unique to Maillot’s interpretation. He has reinvented the role, turning Friar Laurence into a wordless narrator who knows how the tale will end, yet has no power to change it. He’s a pained observer with a haunted look in his eyes, trying relentlessly to stop the changing scenes with desperate fingers clinging to the set pieces as they move. He weaves an image of division and unity, and in his recollections, moves through the stillness with both sacredness and the magnitude of his turmoil. His presence is symbolic. He is never fully there, yet moments of despair find characters reaching for him, and all he can do is turn away in his helplessness. In a haunting metaphor for Friar Laurence’s role in the tragic end, it is not from a bottle that Juliet draws his poison, but rather from his own terrified lips that her fingers pull forth the noxious remedy. His role allows broad strokes of foreshadowing to resound. Most poignant is the prophecy of Act Two’s puppet play carried out by Friar Laurence and his two acolytes, which ingeniously portrays all that will unfold, yet onstage, the watching characters are helpless to turn the hands of fate.
The scene where Paris is pushed upon Juliet is an exquisite example of how vividly Maillot captures character within movement. Each character comes to a brink in this scene, but unlike MacMillan and Cranko’s productions, a character’s reaction is not shown in the reserved shake of a head, a declarative gesture, or even a passionate arabesque, but in a full-bodied, expansive expression of emotion. The air is taut as fury boils through wild-flung limbs, as swirling forms of desperate anger coil around each other, and revolt brims in every anguished eye. Maillot’s bold, fearless propulsion of feeling leaves any other version looking pale in comparison. These are not steps strung together, but rather an impulse of uninhibited, raw reaction. Maillot does not hold back in letting every character break before us, in letting all the unspoken pain rush forth through sharpened gesture. It’s the scene that pushes the story towards its tragic end: the Nurse with conflict burning within her, Lady Capulet’s apathetic withdrawal, and the poor, devastated Juliet with no choice but to erupt in a startling and long overdue revolt.
Each essential element in Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette contributes to the story. From Dominique Drillot’s hues that evoke unspeakable moods, to Jérôme Kaplan’s costumes that shape and sharpen characters in their sumptuous muted tones, to Prokofiev’s lively score, not a single aspect goes to waste; they add to the story just as much as the glorious movement and acting occurring before our eyes. Prokofiev’s dissonance and modernist tone seem destined for Maillot’s rendering, and Maillot lets the score play a role of its own, honoring and using every drop of its extraordinary dramatic intensity. MacMillan and Cranko’s stately ballroom stepping cannot possibly evoke the swift flashes of heightened power that Maillot captures. While their ballroom dancers move politely to the rapturous rhythm of one of Prokofiev’s most well-known, masterful works, in Maillot’s fiery ballroom, the dancers become the music, roaring with the same energy that the music demands.
The score alone declares everything about character, about agony and despair, and Maillot is a choreographer who hears the potential to align movement and music so closely that each note seems to be the natural outpouring from the steps themselves, and each step an ushering from the soul. It is evident that in shaping this work, Maillot listened to and understood the potential within Prokofiev’s score. The potential to capture Shakespeare’s humor in movement, for Lady Capulet’s grief to become a Martha Graham-like contraction and expansion of guttural agony, for the dissonance to represent Friar Laurence’s regretful anguish, for the tender final notes of the balcony pas de deux to steal our breath as two hands are drawn apart, and of course, the pure, unfiltered distress of their final fate.
There is a certain dignity in Maillot’s ending. No lifeless body is flung about or dragged through some torturous dance, but in the depths of authentic reaction, their heartache is poignantly real. “I’m not trying to match the music. How can you match that music? It’s there. You listen and you cry anyway…that was my point…let the music happen” (Manes 2011). Maillot said in 2008 when discussing the death scene in his production, where the dancing falls away in lieu of pure emotion and Prokofiev’s chilling devastation. The set drains of color, stars declare the icy depth of night, and there lies Juliet. It’s no longer a ballet before our eyes, but a scene of frighteningly real terror. In Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette, Juliet’s pointe shoes disappear after the wedding, never to return, and this alone changes everything in the final Act. As Pacific Northwest Ballet’s artistic director Peter Boal recently declared, “Once you see a Juliet die without pointed feet…that makes sense”, and anything else lacks the raw mortality of Maillot’s haunting end.
Some magical ballets make you forget it’s ballet, forget you’re in a theater, even forget, as a writer, to take notes because you’re so deeply entrenched in the experience of it all. Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette is not a centuries-old Renaissance tale, but rather, a real glimpse of humanity glowing in the light for all to reckon with. Shakespeare was poetry, MacMillan was ballet, this is something higher, something more human that suspends reality in its ephemeral light.
Reference:
Manes, S. (2011). Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear: Inside the Land of Ballet. Cadwallader & Stern.
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