‘Here’s that shall make you dance’: Movement and Meaning in Bern:Ballett’s Julia und Romeo

Abstract

In 2009, Bern:Ballett premiered Julia und Romeo, British choreographer Cathy Marston’s dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragic drama. Marston’s balletic conception of the play for the Swiss company is by no means unique. Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Ballet in London — first performed by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev — remains the most successful dance reworking of the tragedy, but choreographers have been employing the play as the basis of their creations since Eusebio Luzzi’s production of Giulietta e Romeo at the Théâtre Samuele, Venice, in 1785. This chapter, using Marston’s ballet as its focus, examines the process by which Early Modern text becomes movement and asks what distinguishes the linguistic content of the play form from the kinetic concept of the dance. In doing so, it discusses ‘meaning’ as a concern of Shakespearean adaptation and investigates the respective contributions of choreographer and dramaturge to the re-presentation of a literary text in narrative ballet. Marston’s reversal of Shakespeare’s play title may point too obviously at a revisionist approach to Early Modern contexts, but her concentration on Julia/Juliet as the memorial reconstructer of the ballet’s action, and hybrid use of classical and contemporary influences, may offer a challenge to Germaine Greer’s description of the dance form as ‘cultural cancer’¹ — a bourgeois and enervated theatre characterized by gender types, set steps, and the crippled bodies of its principal dancers.