It’s the type of dancing that makes you gasp. Jumps that originate from — and land on — the kneecaps. Turns that propel the body across a room as if it were powered by a motor.
This is traditional Georgian dancing, in which gravity-defying leaps and turns are the norm. At a recent dress rehearsal of “Macbeth” at the Metropolitan Opera, dancers flew through the air, leaping off tables and lunging at one another with swords before whipping around and around on their knees at breakneck speed like spinning tops.
“They’re rapid movements, so you have to generate a lot of force in a short period of time,” said the dancer Davit Bakhturidze. You have to get up from awkward positions. And you have to jump far and high — and sometimes roll. “Then while you’re doing that,” Bakhturidze said, “there’s a sword coming at you, so you have to duck, and you have to make sure somebody else behind you is not swinging the other sword at you.”
Oh, and the weapons are made of steel: It’s full contact fighting so visceral that sparks fly when the swords hit.
“That is not a special effect,” said George Goderdzishvili, who has been performing with a fractured finger from an accidental sword swipe. Though they wear kneepads, injuries abound. (The key to recovery? Sauna and cold plunges.)
This is the first time that traditional Georgian dance, which has been performed for thousands of years, has appeared in a Metropolitan Opera production. It’s electrifying and extraordinarily athletic — and a surprising choice for Verdi’s take on Shakespeare’s tale of murderous royal ascent and guilt-fueled madness.
“Macbeth,” which stars Lise Davidsen and Quinn Kelsey, starts and ends in war. So it was important for the director, Louisa Proske, who is making her Met Opera debut, that the fight scenes serve as a “bracket for the whole piece.” (On Oct. 17, “The Met: Live in HD” will livestream the production to movie theaters around the world.)
To bring the dramatic battles to life, Proske tapped the action director Ran Arthur Braun, also making his Met debut. He brought in a troupe of dancers from Pesvebi, a Georgian cultural center and dance company in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, that he had worked with on a 2024 production of “Aida” at the Oper im Steinbruch festival in Austria. He had a feeling the powerful, warrior-like style would translate well to the bloody civil wars in “Macbeth.”
“I wanted something that is visceral, something that is realistic,” Braun said. “I wanted to actually smell the sweat.”
When Proske saw the Georgian dancers perform for the first time, she was stunned. “A weathered choreographer and the really experienced Met dance staff were all in the room,” she said. “Their jaws were on the floor. I mean, we all just couldn’t believe what was happening in front of our eyes, and like the sheer energy and speed and precision that they bring into the room.”
Three Georgians perform — Bakhturidze, 23; the captain, Goderdzishvili, 25; and Data Darakhvelidze, 20; with Luka Kikacheishvili, 21, as the swing — within a larger group of Met dancers and soldiers.
Though physically grueling, the six weeks of daily rehearsal for “Macbeth” were preceded by years of perfecting their craft. The men have studied traditional Georgian dance since they were young children, practicing multiple times a week at Pesvebi, which means “roots” in Georgian and was founded by Goderdzishvili’s parents in 2000.
Their dancing and discipline — the thousands of hours of practice in Brooklyn — now have a larger stage and a new audience.
“Personally, I would never think that I would be performing at this level,” Goderdzishvili said. “Here we are, ready to show New York what we’re made of — the Georgian spirit.”
Dance is embedded into Georgian culture as something deeper than an art form. It’s a language to express shared memory, national identity and the enduring Georgian spirit, resilient after generations of war.
“It teaches us who we were and what we did hundreds of years ago,” said Goderdzishvili, who was born in the United States but lived in Georgia as a child before returning to New York after the 2008 Russian-Georgian war. “And every time I’m onstage wearing our traditional costume, I feel my ancestors within me and their energy.”
Georgian dance is hyper regional. Two types, each from mountainous areas in the north, are featured in “Macbeth.” One is Khevsuruli, a dramatic martial folk dance with high-speed sword and shield combat, which bookends the production.
“It’s in our blood to be good and be comfortable with a sword and a shield,” Goderdzishvili said. “Everyone is required to know that and to feel the warrior spirit.”
The other type is Kazbeguri, a kind of “show-off dance,” Goderdzishvili said, which features high jumps and energetic foot stomping. It’s this style the dancers perform in a climactic banquet scene, flaunting their acrobatics as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth hold a grand coronation feast.
There are only 40 seconds of music at the start of the scene for the Georgians to dance, but they pack it with feats of speed and balance.
“I wish Verdi had written two minutes,” Proske said. “I mean, we could have easily had more music and more dancing, but that’s the music that’s there. And of course, you have to use it. You can’t change the opera.”
Still, the choice to include Georgian dancing in a production more likely to feature Elizabethan movement is a novel one. It took some configuring by Braun and the choreographer, Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson, to fit the vigorous style into the light and bouncy music.
And though it’s unlikely there would be Georgian dancers in Shakespearean times, traveling entertainers were commonplace.
“So I felt like it does fit, in a funny way, into the period,” Proske said.
It’s rare to have fighting at this scale celebrated onstage, Braun said, and he was glad that Proske was open to introducing “violence as an art form.”
“Not just violence for the sense of violence,” he said, “but to integrate this as the theatrical language of the opera, to show how dynamic it is and how it is the thread that connects this story.”
After a full run through recently, Goderdzishvili caught his breath. His finger was wrapped in gauze; ice packs were stuffed under his knee pads.
“I don’t believe there’s a single thing that could stop me from doing this,” he said. “Until my body gives out completely, this is what I’ll be doing.”
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