Abstract
John Cranko made ballet history when he was appointed director and choreographer of the Stuttgart ballet in 1961, the company for which he would create canonical ballets such as Romeo and Juliet (1962), Oneguin (1965) and The Taming of the Shrew (1969). In addition to creating ballets that are now part of the classical repertory of most prominent ballet companies, he fostered young talents during his time as director of the Stuttgart ballet, encouraging dancers such as John Neumeier, Jiří Kylián, and William Forsythe to choreograph their own pieces. His muse, Marcia Haydée – for whom the role of Juliet was choreographed – took over as director from 1976 to 1996, and carried on Cranko's legacy notably by including new pieces by Neumeier, Kylián, and Forsythe into the company's repertoire.
This 2017 production of Cranko's Romeo and Juliet by the Stuttgart Ballet celebrates Cranko's legacy and the history of the ballet company, with a cast featuring the legendary Haydée as Juliet's nurse and Reid Anderson (who directed the company after Haydée, until 2018) as Lord Capulet. While other productions of the ballet, in Cranko's version or in Sir Kenneth MacMillan's (1965), Rudolf Nureyev's (1977), and many subsequent ones, chose to cast more mature dancers in the lead roles, this production clearly stresses the youth and innocence of the two lovers. David Moore as Romeo is the perfect romantic hero, with a princely physique and breadth of movement that is typical of male leads in Romantic ballet; Elisa Badenes embodies perfectly the innocence and youthfulness of Juliet, in her mischievous games with her nurse in 1.2, and her sense of wonder in her first experiences – milestones represented in the ballet by the new dress, the ball, and of course meeting Romeo. As the Nurse, Haydée is fantastic and displays a wonderful expressivity that reflects her artistry as the iconic ballerina she is: trotting and tottering around in the carnival scene (2.1), she is comically flustered when Romeo gives her a kiss, and she exudes warmth and motherly kindness in the scenes featuring Juliet with her inflexible parents (1.2, 3.1 and 3.3).
Cranko's choreography has often been hailed as a masterpiece of narrative ballet; the company has a long history with narrative dance, or ‘ballet d’action’, as its 1759–66 ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre defined it in his Lettres sur la danse (1760). The Noverre Society was founded in Stuttgart in 1958, and is now known as the Noverre: Young Choreographers project, which follows in the footsteps of Cranko in fostering new talents such as Christian Spuck (Ballett Zürich, and newly appointed director of the Staatsballet Berlin from 2023) and Marco Goecke (Scapino Ballet Rotterdam, Nederlands Dans Theater). Like all translations, this particular translation of Shakespeare's play into dance offers its own reading of Shakespeare's original text. The opening of the Capulet ball (1.3), danced to Sergei Prokofiev's famous ‘Dance of the Knights’, is appropriately stiff, which heightens the contrast with the expressivity and energy of the young lovers; in the later version by MacMillan for example, Cranko's three steps to the side followed by a very low assemblé are expanded on a bit, with a different musicality that highlights the ascending and descending patterns of the famous main theme through the tendus écarté, the temps liés and the ronds de jambe en dehors, which are accompanied by the port de bras opening à la seconde. In Cranko's choreography, the simple side-to-side movement and the port de bras underline the pomp and rigidity of the Capulets; on the other hand, in the next scene, Juliet's quick wit (as exemplified in 1.5.92–108) is articulated in her fast footwork and lower leg work. Her sauts de basque and fast petits rond de jambe en l’air are echoed in the following variation by Mercutio's jumps and ballonés, highlighting a sense of playfulness. Her ports de bras, ports de tête and the way she projects from her sternum express her teenage vivacity, her innocence, her dreams, and sense of wonder at her first romantic experience. The ‘star-crossed lovers’ motif appears through the fourth arabesques croisées with port de bras allongé performed respectively in diagonale à gauche and diagonale à droite by Romeo and Juliet in the ball scene and in 2.2, when the lovers meet in Friar Laurence's cloister to be married; their back legs in arabesque croisée each follows a converging diagonal towards the centre of the stage, where the marriage bed and then Juliet's tomb will be placed later on.
The carnivalesque elements in the original play are particularly highlighted in this version of Romeo and Juliet, which is quite remarkable since, as Roland Knowles noted 36 years after the premiere of Cranko's ballet, ‘in most discussions of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare's most radical carnivalesque innovation usually goes unacknowledged’ (Knowles, pp. 36–60). The most obvious reference to carnival is the carnival scene at the beginning of act 2: there are references to maypoles and other village entertainment, the male members of the corps wear grotesque animal masks and skull masks, and Cranko added the character of the king of the carnival, the lord of misrule and his jesters, who all wear motley costumes and perform a series of acrobatic entertaining steps. Mercutio (Martí Fernándes Paixá in this production) performs a tragicomic dance with death after being fatally wounded by Tybalt, and his limp body finally exits the stage supported by Romeo and Benvolio, in a pose that will be echoed in 3.1 in the pas de deux between Romeo and Juliet.
The bedroom pas de deux (3.1) really stresses the carnivalesque element of the ‘dance of death’ motif in the play (Knowles, p. 50), in a version that is considerably darker than MacMillan's; while in his version MacMillan emphasises the passion, abandon and awakening sensuality of the two lovers, Romeo and Juliet perform an actual ‘dance of death’ in Cranko's ballet, where, after waking up in their nuptial bed, they in turns go limp in each other's arms repeatedly in the pas de deux – Juliet in a pose announcing the final scene when Romeo finds her in the crypt and tries to awaken her, and Romeo performs a series of steps to the side, his arms extended Christ-like as if on a cross, his head hanging in desolation, while Juliet is clinging to his neck. The ‘dance of death’ motif is also repeated throughout this production with the many references to vanitas: this filmed version is edited, and contrary to a live performance, there are no intermissions, no moments when the orchestra leaves and comes back in, etc. These moments are instead replaced by ‘still lives’ shots, showing swords, flowers, skulls, skull masks, the vial containing Juliet's death draught. The vanitas motif is therefore foregrounded in the editing, but it is present in the original choreography as well, notably in the masks worn during the carnival scene, or in Friar Laurence's ‘still life’ pantomime with a skull and a bough with fresh blossoms at the beginning of 2.2, which announces the fateful end of the lovers he is about to marry. The bawdy element – another crucial element of carnival – is however downplayed in Cranko's version, while it is more visible in MacMillan's version that premiered three years later: MacMillan's choreography is more sensual, and in the town square scene at the beginning of the second act, Cranko's three gypsies are replaced by three harlots. As in Shakespeare's original text, the Nurse is the embodiment of Bakhtinian carnivalesque: this is even more true in this production since the ballerina who debuted the role of Juliet now dances the Nurse. Haydée's portrayal of an old woman, with doddering facial expressions and a trembling gait, offers a grotesque counterpart to Juliet's staccato pointework, and this casting choice could also be read as a meta-choreographic comment on female roles in ballet: in the ballet repertory, Juliet represents the essence of youth and freshness, so casting a former fresh face as the Nurse (Haydée was 25 and a newly appointed principal of the company when she debuted the role) also symbolises the vanitas and ageism in ballet, where, as bright young dancers age, lose their stamina and ballon, they move from the constant search for elevation and lightness to ballet's own version of Bakhtinian degradation – the roles that require more pantomime than dance, usually reserved for older characters such as parental figures, who move about onstage, perform expressive gestures, but never leave the ground.
Cranko's Romeo and Juliet is the third ballet version of Shakespeare's play set to Prokofiev's score, after Leonid Lavrovsky's (1940) and Sir Frederick Ashton's (1955); and since the 1960s, multiple new versions have been produced every decade, from other canonical classical ones (John Neumeier [1971], Nureyev [1977]) to more contemporary versions (Angelin Preljocaj [1996], Jean-Christophe Maillot [1996], Youri Vámos [1999]). The ballet has become a classic in the repertory, and just like other classics such as The Nutcracker or Swan Lake, ballet companies often produce their own versions: Peter Martins revisited this classic in 2007 for the New York City Ballet, and Helgi Tomasson produced his own version for San Francisco Ballet in 1994. The most daring and innovative versions were certainly those created by two female choreographers, Bronislava Nijinska and Sasha Waltz, choreographed respectively in 1926 for the Ballets Russes and in 2007 for the Paris Opera, that used lesser-known musical scores – Constant Lambert for the 1926 production and Hector Berlioz for the 2007 version – and modernised the timeless story of the two star-crossed lovers of Verona.
Roland Knowles, ‘Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet’, in Roland Knowles (ed.), Shakespeare and Carnival, After Bakhtin (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), pp. 36–60.