If you’ve seen any of director Kip Williams’s “cine-theatre” works for the Sydney Theatre Company in recent years, chances are you’ll feel right at home watching choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s Romeo and Juliet Suite, a condensed version of Shakespeare’s story told in contemporary-classical dance, set to the music of Sergei Prokofiev and featuring video transmitted live to onstage screens.
Presented by Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project and performed by a company of 12, the story of the star-cross’d lovers is cut to its barest bones. There are no warring “houses” here, no great sense of prior conflict. Romeo, Juliet, Tybalt and Mercutio are identifiable (if you have some high school basics still in your head), but the rest of Shakespeare’s characters have failed to make the cut. There’s no Friar Lawrence to plot a path to wedlock; no Nurse dispensing advice to her young charge; no dad threatening exile and death. Gone too are many of the original plot points, including the lovers’ wedding. The piece takes a little over 80 minutes to unfold.
The dancers perform on a large square space backed by an equally large cinema-style screen, which defaults to a warm, Rothko-esque abstract when it’s not being used for projections. Video is sent live from a Steadicam operator and occasionally (and very effectively) from a fixed camera high above the stage, pointing directly down and giving us a drone’s-eye view of the dancers below. The video is streamed with impressively minimal latency so it feels more a part of the choreography and less like a visual echo of what is happening on the stage.
Millepied departs from traditional gender norms and his Suite is different from night to night. On this occasion, the roles of Romeo and Juliet were danced by two men – David Adrian Freeland Jr and Mario Gonzalez, respectively. On another night during the season you might find you’re watching two women, or a man and a woman. But whoever is dancing, Millepied’s choreography – which blends contemporary and classical elements seamlessly – remains the same (though the energy, one imagines, could be considerably different).
Far from feeling gimmicky, the cameras seem to free the storytelling and the event as a whole. As well as allowing us to observe the dancing from unusual angles and observe faces in dramatic closeup, it also dissolves the boundaries of the stage and, in a brilliant passage of dancing, the walls of the Joan Sutherland theatre itself. One striking scene brings another Romeo and Juliet adaptation, West Side Story, to mind as we watch the lovers escape the confines of the hall and head for the outdoors to cavort against a backdrop of Jørn Utzon’s sails and a Sydney skyline aglow with Vivid festival. As the lovers roll around on the chilly slabs of the forecourt, a Sydney harbour seagull performs an unplanned cameo and gets one of the night’s biggest rounds of applause.
Elsewhere, action takes place in the Joan Sutherland’s scene dock and in side-of-stage and backstage areas. The ball at which Romeo meets Juliet is held behind a black curtain upstage with cameras giving us access to a throbbing party with dancers gyrating under glitter balls to the heavy processional tread of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights. It’s a fascinating musical-visual tension.
Later, after a chase and fight that sees Romeo and Tybalt crashing along corridors and down metal stairways, Tybalt (an excellent Lorrin Brubaker) bleeds out on a dirty concrete floor in what becomes quite a powerful piece of cinema.
From a choreographic perspective, Millepied runs a tight ship without sacrificing physical looseness and playfulness. Unison work is impressively synced. Solos arise quite naturally from the story rather than serve as standalone demonstrations of technique.
Freeland and Gonzalez generate muscular heat in the title roles and the physical equivalence in their push and pull feels both fresh and sexy; their kiss (caught in closeup) had the audience cheering. Also notable on this night was Shu Kinouchi, who danced a vigorous Mercutio.
The acting is good – for a dance production, certainly – and the final scenes are replete with Shakespearean “woe”, even though the emotion of the final scene didn’t seem to make much of an impact among the opening night crowd. Altogether though, this is a surprising, often thrilling experience.
Romeo and Juliet Suite is playing at Sydney Opera House until 9 June
