I have always felt that Prokofiev’s lush score was almost too overpowering to tell the story of two teenagers in love, so the trick with this piece was balancing the hugeness of the music with the fragility of the two characters. Oh, and to give the dancers room to breathe.
Romeo and Juliet is hardly a novel idea for a ballet. I wanted to make sure that in my version of the piece, I was creating more of what Romeo and Juliet has come to mean to the general public. Meaning, I wanted to focus on the intimacy of two young people in love, rather than huge street scenes filled with gratuitous townsfolk and sword fighting. So rather than have a large 3 act ballet filled with macho swaggering and ponderous family feuds, I hope I have created something that is as fast and fleeting as that first, sudden, sensation of love and desire.
I also had an aversion to the Prokofiev score. It’s just so big and lush. It didn’t sound like a 16 year old and a 14 year old falling in love for the first time. It is SO full of passion that (to me at least) it lacked the delicacy that I was looking for in telling the story. I ended up cutting out about half of the music and finally found the balance I was looking for.
Finally, even though I direct and choreograph musicals, I tend to stay away from story ballets. I am just not that interested in watching dancers pretend to be someone else. I would rather see them dance as themselves. One of the reasons that I decided to do this particular piece was that I had two dancers in the company who I felt would be perfectly cast in these parts.
