“Romeo + Julia”, Operaballet Vlaanderen
Dana Rufolo in Antwerp
15 April 2025
I saw the dramatic ballet (or “drambalet” as Prokofiev called it), Romeo + Julia choreographed for the 33 dancers of the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen by the distinguished Marcos Morau to Prokofiev’s 1935 score on April 4, 2025.
Photo credit: Danny Willems.
Morau’s is an original and lyrical interpretation of Romeo and Juliet as a play not about love but about violence and the belligerent impulses of humankind. In this mysterious, abstract and haunting interpretation, there are no individual identities. All is flux, flow, merging, and bubbling desire to briefly embrace, quickly connect and then hit, maul, and destroy. Humanity has been reduced to one entity, a mass.
In Morau’s version, there is no wooing Romeo and passionate Juliet nor dying Tybalt – nor any other character from Shakespeare’s play. Instead, one female transitional character stands out briefly before sinking back into the seething, gesticulating heap of humanity. Especially when the dancers are enclosed within a mid-stage circular curtain designed to resemble a church because of the Gothic windows in it (no stained glass), we feel the power of the Zeitgeist. The dancers respond to the violent impulses of their era without the possibility of retaliating through the transcendence that we firmly believe to be the power of love.
This brilliant interpretation tells us our belief system is flawed. Morau reads the tragic end of Shakespeare’s play as an admission that love is not transcendent. The closest we come to love is innocence, he asserts, and so two children, a girl and a boy, open the performance and remain ever-present if on the sidelines and sometimes under the care of this transitional dancer who represents the passage from innocence to aggressive adulthood; they are playing with bricks, building towers and castles in fanciful imitation of the adult landscape they are enclosed within.
The dancers’ movements fuse to Prokofiev’s music flawlessly. Gavin Sutherland conducts to create an auditory experience of exceptional energy and excitement, and three ominous electronic soundscapes by Lukas Hellings provide extra depth. Because individual characters are eliminated in this production, so also the pliés and pirouettes and pas à deux associated with performing Prokofiev’s ballet are gone. Traditionally, the focus is on the trained bodies of the characters. Consequently, the display of muscularity and balletic fluency interferes with the audience’s access to the music. But in this modern dance interpretation, no overwhelming visual obstacles stand between the audience and the music. The dancers have been deboned, dematerialized. Their dark costumes and sombre stage set by Max Glaenzel help to suggest that the dancers are wraiths.
Photo credit: Danny Willems.
We hear, of course, the most famous sequences of Prokofiev’s music. In the Dance of the Knights, we see a young man enter with a sword. Morau must have created a code associating different scenes with different movements. I am not familiar enough with the music to securely decode this ultrasophisticated pairing between movement and the music.
However, scenes I remember include seeing the dancers huddle and stretch forward – this sideways. There is also a tender moment when two characters, male and female, rise to full height and emerge from the mass to embrace. But then they push away from each other. All of the dancers are in loose dark costumes by Silvia Delagneau, including the two dancers who initially enter the stage with cloth flowing behind that resembles wings – they appear to be gliding; the air is murky, there is a pyre that brings to mind the burning of Jan Huss after the Council of Constance declared him a heretic some 150 years before Romeo and Juliet was written; at some point dancers are covered in cinders.
There is a scene where only the white skin of the faces of that particular group of dancers shines in contrast to the darkness of their suggestively medieval robes. Long LED lights are intended to represent candles. In addition to the stage centre circular curtain which resembles a Gothic church and that contains all the dancers and cast in a final scene that implies they are caught within their period in history, there is also a circular white curtain that descends and lifts periodically. The dancers pulsate like musical notes come alive in precise synchrony to the rhythms of the score which has been shortened to eliminate some of the repetitiveness. (The performance lasts for one hour and 20 minutes, whereas Prokofiev’s original musical score is approximately an hour longer.)
The Operaballet Vlaanderen’s dancers are exceptional in terms of rigorous daily practice, flexibility, knowledge of different dance styles from ballet to Gaga, and endurance – as I have said in previous articles. Morau, a Spanish choreographer who has his own company and has recently shot to fame, developed a striking oppositional body movement pattern that is new to them although typical of his style, seen in particular in Nachtträume for Ballett Zürich in 2022. Morau instructed the dancers to push an isolated body part in a certain direction and at the same time to reach in the opposite direction with the rest of their body. I was most impressed by repetitions of a certain angularity antithetical to classical movement: a rapid sidewise snap of the head on an outstretched neck, reminding me of the German poet Josef Guggenmos’ description of a tulip shooting its long neck up from the earth and looking around curiously with a pretty tulip face.
But, in effect, I believe one can interpret these movements as a reflection on the theme of opposites on which Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is based (think of Romeo’s line: “O brawling love! O loving hate!”). Since Morau aims for the core conflicts in this Shakespearean drama, this extrapolation is not unlikely.
The major drawback to Morau’s interpretation is the darkness into which the stage is plunged. It is in keeping with the pre-electricity era in which Romeo and Juliet was performed, and of course the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe Theatre in London is lit by candlelight only, so there is precedent, but still it was difficult for me in a relatively close seat to see the action distinctly. It may be that the intention is for audience to merely garner impressions, for the programme tells us that the semi-obscurity draws us into a “dream world, a nightmarish machine that exposes our most dormant, ominous instinct”. Even if we are seduced by this alternative reality of dusk and sombre actions, nonetheless it would be easier to remember the performance not just as a feeling but as a series of events if there had been more light by which to see it.
