Prokofiev’s stormy, vivid ballet score “Romeo and Juliet” has beguiled many choreographers. But for a long time, Benjamin Millepied resisted its call.
“In dance, the Prokofiev has been so overdone that I think I started to categorize it as second-rate,” said Millepied, the artistic director of the L.A. Dance Project and a perpetually busy choreographer. “I had been asked before to create a production, and I always said no.”
A former New York City Ballet dancer who was briefly the artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet, Millepied is also a cinephile who has created and worked on multiple films. (He and his ex-wife, the actress Natalie Portman, met on the set of “Black Swan.”) A few years ago, he began to come around on the Prokofiev ballet — as a potential movie score.
“I love the music from old Hollywood movies, and I was realizing how heavily those film composers were influenced by Prokofiev and Ravel,” he said in a video interview. Working backward, “I started hearing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ differently.”
Millepied’s “Romeo and Juliet Suite” — created for the L.A. Dance Project in 2022, and opening at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday — ended up marrying Prokofiev’s music to both live dance and film. The work features choreography that often spills off the stage, traversing theater hallways and backrooms. A camera follows the dancers everywhere, broadcasting footage on a screen that looms over the proscenium. Some of the story’s most charged moments, including the balcony scene and the killing of Tybalt, are only shown onscreen.
A film-centric “Romeo and Juliet” aligns with Millepied’s ongoing efforts to blend classical dance and contemporary culture — to create works that speak to a broader audience than the typical ballet crowd. The close gaze of the camera allows for storytelling on a more human scale than conventional dance acting, with its oversize gestures. Simple costumes and props create a setting that feels both modern and removed from time. Millepied has likewise pared down the story of the star-crossed lovers to its barest outline: Romeo meets Juliet, they fall in love, and tragedy ensues, without minor characters to slow down the action.
Perhaps most notably, this retelling isn’t always a boy-meets-girl story. In alternating casts, Romeo and Juliet are played by two men, two women or a man and a woman. That choice felt both important and natural to Millepied.
“Of course love has all these different ways of being,” he said. “Really, how could we not do it this way?”
For many dancers, Prokofiev’s score is inextricably linked to the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan’s lavish, swooning, relatively conventional “Romeo and Juliet” from 1965. It is performed by ballet companies around the world, and Millepied saw it as a teenager in France, on a date with his first girlfriend.
“The MacMillan version is the kind of ballet you see and hear so frequently that it attaches to your whole dream of becoming a dancer,” said Daphne Fernberger, one of the L.A. Dance Project’s Romeos.
But for Millepied, it was not MacMillan but Jerome Robbins who offered a model to follow. While at City Ballet, Millepied danced in Robbins’s “West Side Story Suite,” a streamlined restaging of the dances from the Broadway musical “West Side Story.”
For today’s audiences, “having the dance be expressed through a drive of spontaneous feelings is really important,” Millepied said. “I think Jerry’s ‘West Side Story Suite,’ which is really a series of tableaus, made me believe that would be possible to do.”
Two preliminary experiments also helped convince Millepied that he could do a “Romeo and Juliet.” In 2019, he made a short film depicting the balcony scene, with Margaret Qualley and Shameik Moore dancing and reciting lines from the Shakespeare play. (It will be released on Monday, on the platform Nowness.)
Around the same time, he was asked to choreograph dance sequences for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performances of the Prokofiev score. Since the orchestra took up most of the stage, he decided to send cameras after the dancers as they moved throughout Walt Disney Concert Hall.
“The drama of this story, the love and the violence, I realized I could create it on camera and make it feel real,” Millepied said. And he discovered that live video and live dance made a potent combination.
“You fall in love with characters that you see live in the flesh, in front of your eyes,” he said. “But then when the camera brings you close to them, it creates a different kind of intimacy.”
In “Romeo and Juliet Suite,” the camera operator becomes a kind of shadow character. So it’s fitting that he’s also a dancer: Sebastien Marcovici, a New York City Ballet veteran and the L.A. Dance Project’s associate artistic director.
“In some ways I am the narrator of the story,” said Marcovici, who has long been interested in movies and cinematography. The camera’s relationship to the dancers, he said, is a lot like the relationship between ballet partners. “I have to know the music, know the counts, know exactly where they’re going to be at each moment,” he said.
Marcovici’s cues change dramatically as the production moves from theater to theater. Since much of “Romeo and Juliet Suite” occurs offstage, Millepied tailors the work to each location’s behind-the-scenes spaces. “We basically reinvent it every time,” Millepied said.
Previous renditions have set the balcony scene outdoors, like on a raised terrace at La Seine Musicale outside Paris and in the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House. That’s not replicable at the Armory. “We looked at the roof, but March, New York — it wasn’t going to happen,” Millepied said. Still, he’s eager to make use of the location’s labyrinth of reception rooms and offices, many rarely seen by the public, which offer a very different feel than its famous drill hall, where the audience will be seated.
“All those rooms, all those stairs!” he said, grinning.
Some of the work’s choreography also changes slightly from cast to cast, to fit the different leading dancers. Fernberger said that she and Millepied have thought especially carefully about the scene in which she, as Romeo, fights Tybalt, who is always danced by a man.
“The violence makes it a really delicate moment,” she said. “It can be genuinely scary for me. We’ve been working on making it feel safe but still emotionally true.”
Romantic duets require little reinvention. David Adrian Freeland Jr., another Romeo, said the different casts do “98 percent” the same choreography. “The dancing is ultimately just about believable human connection, not gender roles,” he said.
When “Romeo and Juliet Suite” premiered in France, Millepied was surprised by reactions to the same-sex couples. “There was quite a lot of pushback,” he said. “On all these talk shows and radio shows, it was like, ‘Oh, he’s woke, he’s just doing it to make noise.’”
New Yorkers, he said, are more likely to meet the casting with a shrug — which would be very New York, but also heartening.
“I don’t think it will surprise anyone here,” Millepied said. “I know the world is so on edge right now. But I hope people will see that this is a universal story of love.”
The post This ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Dance Unfolds Onstage and on Camera appeared first on New York Times.
