Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare
Mark Morris Dance Group
Barbican
Like child prodigies, enfants terribles do not last forever. As both epithets imply, there is always a fairly traumatic moment in which they stop being children. True, enfants terribles normally outlive child prodigies, at least because the label is never so strictly related to their physical age, particularly in the arts world. Yet, they too, like most common mortals, grow up and age. Take the formidable dance maker Mark Morris, who has long remained an exquisite enfant terrible and the one who regaled us with many a provocative work informed by a mischievously Peter Pan-ish approach to the tenets of high art. Like many, I was looking forward to his Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare, expecting something in line with his acclaimed gender-crossing adaptations of ballet classics such as The Nutcracker or his saucily unorthodox renditions of operatic masterworks such as Dido and Aeneas.
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