BERLIN – Created in 2007 for the Paris Opera with music by Hector Berlioz, this year, for the first time, Romeo and Juliet by Sasha Waltz was staged at the at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
The stage design is very impressive.
Made up of two imposing white platforms, its sloping form puts the balance of the extraordinary dancers’ to the test in the Shakespearean play, in which the story of the Veronese families unfolds.
The dancers move between the different levels created by the mobile platforms that rise and that suspend the two protagonists, who declare their love in the air. They are then brought back to the slanting plane on which the Chorus scenes take place, from the bustling brawls between the Capulets and the Montagues, to the party at the House of Capulet, until the tragic end.
There is the breathtaking scene of Juliet’s burial underneath a bed of stones that Romeo removes in order to reach his beloved before his death.
ROMEO UND JULIETTE
DEUTSCHE OPER BERLIN Bernd-Uhlig
The airy dance, made up of light and fluid movements, fills the large stage space with long lines drawn out by the dancers’ costumes in shades of white or black.
ROMEO UND JULIETTE
DEUTSCHE OPER BERLIN Yael-Schnell-Joel-Suárez-Gómez
A dance, which is almost neoclassical, very far from the innovative experiments in “Travelogue – Twenty to eight” from the early 90s, but equally distant from the repertoire of Fonteyn & Nureyev.
The orchestra in the pit is also fundamental to the thrilling narrative of the drama. Its music accompanies singers who vie for the scene, sometimes as choral interventions, other times with solos, which at the finale become at one with the dance troupe.
It’s an elegant and sumptuous show – despite not being innovative – whose greatest value is to harmonize and perfectly bled singers and dancers
