Two Romeo and Juliets: The National Ballet and the RWB

Commentary Two Romeo and Juliets: the National Ballet and the RWB JAMES E. NEUFELD Successful story ballet, the effective presentation of narrative through dance, is no easy achievement. By the late nineteenth century, Petipa had perfected the form and rendered it almost formulaic. He relied for his effects on a standardized, highly conventional vocabulary of mime and gesture, on a well-judged balance of ensemble and solo numbers, on a careful alternation of advancement of the story line with pure dance and on the classical pas de deux as the centrepiece of the entire production. Twentieth-century choreography moved away from the lavish spectacle and classical symmetry which Petipa had made synonymous with story ballet. In doing so it abandoned the forms and conventions, the effectiveness of which he had demonstrated, to become smaller in scope, more intimate in scale, less conventional in form. Fokine's successful rebellion, at the beginning of the century, against the conventional mime of classical story ballet heralded a major transformation of the genre, if not the demise of the genre itself. Fokine deprived story ballet of a well-defined, explicit means of communicating narrative detail 'and so restricted its narrative capability. Insofar as it remained significant in the twentieth century, story ballet portrayed with increasing acuteness the mood and significance of individual events in isolation but lost the ability to convey a sense of narrative sequence and consequence. Narrative sequence, the creating of the sense that one event happens because it is preceded by an earlier one and, in turn, necessarily implies a concluding one, is the hallmark of the Petipa story ballet and the major stumbling-block for all but a handful of contemporary choreographers who attempt the form. Their vision seems to be microscopic rather than panoramic and their works reflect that restricted vision. Of all possible subjects for story ballet, Romeo and Juliet calls out most loudly for the panoramic vision, for a fully articulated expression of the sense of consequence that binds together isolated events and makes consequential, makes inevitable, the apparently senseless deaths of the lovers. "Because things happened in just this sequence, Romeo and Juliet had to die." Such is the sense of narrative consequence a successful rendition of the tale must communicate. Shakespeare achieves it by emphasizing the controlling fate of the star-crossed lovers and their houses and by developing the framing story of feud and reconciliation of the two families to provide a public 120 rationale, however unsatisfying, for the private tragedy at the heart of the tale. But Shakespeare had words at his disposal to emphasize these connections; twentieth-century choreographers have neither words nor the conventional mime which classical ballet had devised in place of them. They must find other ways of communicating the narrative consequence of their events or suffer in the attempt. For the past twenty years, there has been only one Romeo and Juliet for Canadian dance audiences, the National Ballet's production of the late John Cranko's version, with sets and costumes by Jurgen Rose. In the 1981-82 season, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet finally broke this monopoly by mounting Rudi van Dantzig's version of the story, with decor and costumes by Toer van Schayk. This kind of challenge has long been necessary, not for competitive purposes but to broaden our dance horizons and educate us, as a national audience, to the possibilities inherent in a single theme. Indeed, the inevitable comparison of companies rightly takes second place to the comparison of choreographic purpose and achievement which the two productions provide. But managements can be extremely timid in their programming. Whether by chance or by design, no city (in eastern Canada at any rate) could see both productions in a single season last year. Ottawa and Toronto were as close as these two Romeo and Juliets came to each other, although both companies appeared in both cities on their national tours. The inevitable and necessary comparison has not yet been made easily available to the Canadian public. Van Dantzig and Cranko begin, inevitably, from a common starting point. Both have been faced with the same initial restrictions of Shakespeare's wellknown dramatization of the story and Prokofiev...