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. Little did I know that his Romeo was to be the performance that signalled an abrupt change in his creative flow. His new three-acter looks like the work of a seemingly tired artist who decided to give up the ingenious artistic pranks he was once famous for. Indeed, Mercutio and Tybalt are played by two female dancers in drag and the star-crossed lovers live happily ever after at the end of the ballet. But neither solution adds that much in terms of controversy, and simply replicates ideas that have had their time. After all, most people seem to forget that a fairly long series of happy-ending ballet versions of the Shakespearean work started with Bronislava Nijinska in 1926, years before Prokofiev, whose monumental ballet score Morris refers to, started toying with a non-dramatic finale.
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