Romeo and Juliet: the dance of love

 Romeo and Juliet: dance as the language of love

Dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have been and continue to be highly popular, and they work so fluidly because they’re concerned, at their core, with emotions that transcend language or logic, and instead lean on something emotional and electric between two people. Is it love? Is it lust? Is it infatuation? Such questions are reasonable, but superfluous. What matters is the something at the heart of the relationship - the fire, the magnetism. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to discount Shakespeare’s work of literature entirely; my point is not that words are insufficient and therefore utterly useless in the attempt to explore such a relationship. In fact I’d argue we begin to understand emotions like those depicted in Romeo and Juliet when we have a language to express those ideas in. Instead, my point is that such a story can be wordless, and still carry the same weight, the same emotion, the same narrative power. Is it not a wonder that we might be told a whole story without a single word having been uttered? 

I was lucky enough to have the chance to watch Matthew Bourne’s production of Romeo + Juliet recently. What I found the most interesting about the production wasn’t the story, because let’s be honest we’ve seen Romeo and Juliet a million different ways already, but instead the way the abstract setting of Bourne’s production opened the audience up to really imagine what it might be like to feel the love story for themselves. By taking away any anchors of time and place, we have to construct a whole new scenario for ourselves, or we have to grab onto what we have on stage and let it overtake us. When you’re faced with such an austere set, it seems only natural to cling onto the only semblance of human nature you find in the movement and connections between people. 

With the sheer volume of adaptations Romeo and Juliet has already seen, and Shakespeare’s own plagiaristic process when conceiving of his version of the story, I think it’s fair to say Romeo and Juliet has a kind of timelessness. The story exists both in a vacuum of time and space as this romance of apparently cosmic proportions unfolds, and across great swathes of time as it continues to reiterate and reinvent itself. For Bourne’s production, contemporary ballet choreography creates a sense of modernity whilst also being so abstract to avoid being tied to any specific time or place. 

As an artform for adaptation, clearly dance also works because its basis is physical interactions which convey pure emotion and transcend verbal language. Shakespeare’s language is poetry, and is dance not a kind of poetry itself? Not only this, but there’s also space for ambiguity and interpretation - of scenario, of dialogue, of narrative - especially in this production by Matthew Bourne. Music plays an enormously important role in storytelling and understanding characters,  their relationships, and emotional tone of the story at every scene. For Romeo and Juliet this is consolidated even further by the fact that Prokofiev’s score for the story has been used across many different productions. 

Romeo and Juliet has precisely the parts necessary for dance to be a powerful medium for adaptation. The relationship between the lovers is at the forefront of this story, obviously, but readers and audiences of Shakespeare’s play have often wondered at the blossoming of the romance. How did it happen? Why was it so brief and so intense? What drew them together? Of course you could go with the easy answer that the play is a work of fiction where anything goes. But why not imagine the possibilities? Eyes meet across a crowded dance floor and suddenly the world stops. Why do we need to rationalise that moment? Why can we not, as Romeo and Juliet do, simply sit in the moment and feel the air shift around us? Something momentous is occurring - let it happen.

Words give Shakespeare’s lovers a way to bridge the gap between them. Dance needs no words to express a whole wealth of delicate emotions and thoughts. Something connects those two people, and there are no words that can connect them in such a way. Words and movement are simply two different mediums of expression that give us a way to understand this moment and what it means. 

At the end of the day, all we really care about is that vital connection between Romeo and Juliet, their physical chemistry and intimacy (requiring trust, vulnerability and strength), and the freedom they can enjoy in the act of speaking, perhaps through dancing. And ultimately the emotional expression of characters through dancers leads to a highly cathartic experience for both performers and audiences. When the curtain falls and the two bodies are draped dramatically over a bed, limp with the physical and emotional exhaustion of an intense story, it becomes absolutely apparent that there’s an immense power in the ability to tell a story with no words.