Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance vol. 8 (23), 2011 56 DOI: 10.2478/v10224-011-0005-6 Alan Brissenden Dancing Shakespeare in Australia “I think it’s brave of anyone to make a ballet out of a Shakespeare play” (Buckle 163).1 So wrote Richard Buckle, one of the greatest dance critics of the twentieth century, in the Sunday Times for St Valentine’s Day 1965—appropriately, for he was reviewing Fonteyn and Nureyev in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, and the quotation began with his declaring “It was jolly brave of Kenneth MacMillan to tackle Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet after the overwhelming Lavrovsky version [which he had reviewed on 21 July 1963]” and continued “—but then I think it’s brave of anyone to make a ballet out of a Shakespeare play”. Leonid Lavrovsky’s was the first Soviet version of Prokofiev’s ballet, given its premiere by the Kirov Ballet in January 1940 with Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev. Lavrovsky’s and MacMillan’s versions are just two of the many, for more dance works are related to Romeo and Juliet than to any other Shakespeare play. Eusebio Luzzi’s, seen in Venice in 1785, was one of the earliest of all Shakespearian ballets. The most recent is probably being choreographed somewhere in the world right now, even if only a pas de deux, and a new version by François Klaus was presented by the Queensland Ballet in December 2007. It was with a pas de deux from MacMillan’s ballet, danced by guest stars Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, that Romeo and Juliet first entered the Australian Ballet’s repertoire, while the company was on tour in Nice in August 1965. Nine years later, it gave the Australian premiere of John Cranko’s full- length version of 1958. The company has successfully revived it several times, most recently in 2003. Reviewing a performance by the Stuttgart Ballet for the New Yorker in 1973, Andrew Porter commented that where Lavrovsky’s and MacMillan’s versions had a sense of “words just below the surface of the dance [Cranko’s was] more generalized, less intense in its close-ups … less literary” (Balanchine and Mason 503).2 Often, however, Cranko expresses the spirit of the words rather than giving a line for line translation into movement. This seems to me to be the case with a trio for Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio, full of teenage exuberance, with rippling arms, plenty of jumps, shoulder bumping and spins, which equates with the wit combat of 2.3.32-80. Productions allow, of course, for individual interpretations of character, and both MacMillan and Cranko give opportunity for the dancer of Lady Capulet to do more than merely hint at her 1 Richard Buckle, Buckle at the Ballet (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 163. 2 George Balanchine and Francis Mason, Balanchine’s Festival of Ballet (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), 503. * Alan Brissenden is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow in the University of Adelaide, Australia. © by the author, licensee Łódź University – Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Dancing Shakespeare in Australia 57 erotic attraction to her cousin Tybalt. In 2003 the Australian Ballet’s Lynette Wills virtually threw herself onto her dead kinsman’s bier, lengthwise, as it was carried out—a gesture also in the Lavrovsky version. And while Shakespeare is closely followed in all of the big three, he is also extended—they all include Rosaline, for instance, and MacMillan adds further complication by making her the object of Tybalt’s affections as well as Romeo’s. Lavrovsky, however, is the only one of the four to bring the Montagues and the Capulets together in reconciliation at the end—for the others, the end comes when the lovers die, Juliet reaching out for Romeo. Prokofiev’s score, magnificent as it is, poses problems which few if any choreographers have successfully overcome in that there are passages for ensembles which are too long, and the narrative tension drops. This is certainly the case with the Cranko and even the MacMillan versions. But not all choreographers have used Prokofiev’s score, which closely follows the play’s narrative, while introducing a number of diversions. Antony Tudor used music by the English composer Frederick Delius for his compressed one-act version for American Ballet Theatre in 1943, and 42 years later Barry Moreland made a selection of Renaissance music for his choreography for the West Australian Ballet. These versions mostly followed Shakespeare’s narrative closely, as did Harold Collins’s for the Queensland Ballet in 1982 and Ted Brandsen’s for the West Australian Ballet in 2000, though Brandsen greatly increased the importance of Lady Capulet, who at times seemed more like a vindictive and manipulative Lady Macbeth. The first Australian ballet derived from the play, however, took a different tack, and with great success. In 1951, Paul Grinwis, a Belgian dancer who had been recruited as a principal by Edouard Borovansky, created his first ballet, Les Amants Eternels (The Eternal Lovers) to Tchaikowsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. The Borovansky company took classical ballet to Australian audiences intermittently from 1944 to 1960, and was the precursor of the Australian Ballet which was founded in 1961. Grinwis conceived his one-act work as a continuation of the story of two lovers, when they awake in an after- life—“we shall call them Romeo and Juliet”, he wrote in a program note, “because we always think of theirs as one of the greatest of all loves”. Its focal point was a struggle for the Lovers’ souls between the spirits of Love and Death, Love, not unexpectedly, being finally victorious. The composer’s musical depiction of the conflict between the two families now supported the fight between Love and Death and their followers. William Constable’s surrealistic décor of an endless plain merging into a sky of flared clouds diminishing to a central point was an excellent foil for the cast’s Renaissance costumes—Juliet in simple white embroidered with silver, Romeo in cream and blue jerkin and blue tights, Death in purple and silver with a dark cloak and helmet, his servants in black, with black gauntlets, Love in cerise and her retinue in blue, with elbow-length cream gloves. Grinwis devised a number of unusual lifts in this work—at the beginning, for example, to give a feeling of weightlessness as the Lovers awake in the spirit world—and two arched rostrums midway on either side were significant for the action. To effect the final reunion of the Lovers, Juliet, outstretched as though in flight, was taken from © by the author, licensee Łódź University – Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 58 Alan Brissenden Figure 1: The choreographer, Paul Grinwis, and Kathleen Gorham as Romeo and Juliet in Les Amants Eternels (The Eternal Lovers). Borovansky Ballet, 1951. (Photo author’s collection.) stage to rostrum level by a series of lifts by Death’s minions. The Eternal Lovers was the most artistically successful ballet created for the Borovansky company and the only original work produced in 1951 to be included in subsequent seasons. It had its last performance in 1960. During subsequent years Australian choreographers who produced a number of Romeo and Juliet pas de deux included Mischa Slavensky in Hobart in 1960, Charles Lisner for the Queensland Ballet two years later and Rex Reid for the West Australian Ballet in 1973, but it was not until 1999 that another interpretive rather than narrative work was created. This was Natalie Weir’s Dry Sorrow for the West Australian Ballet (a company which seems drawn to the play). A one-act ballet danced to Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead, the work was Weir’s response to the final tomb scene, with the lovers and a chorus of eight dancers. The tomb also became the lovers’ bed, as it may well have done on the Elizabethan stage. When Shakespeare’s beleaguered Juliet is being coerced into marriage with Paris, she begs her mother to postpone the marriage, or if not to “make the bridal bed/ In that dim monument where Tybalt lies” (3.5.200-1), and Elizabethan four- posters looked the same as many elaborate tombs of the same period. After Romeo and Juliet, the overwhelming favourite for choreographers is A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we can go back to Henry Purcell’s operatic transformation of 1691, The Fairy Queen, for the beginning of a tradition of the © by the author, licensee Łódź University – Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Dancing Shakespeare in Australia 59 play as an entertainment with a cut text, songs and dances, which lasted well into the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, Mendelssohn’s music, composed in 1843, had much to do with this. First used by Ludwig Tieck at Potsdam in the same year, “and from Charles Kean’s production in 1856 until the production at the Old Vic in 1954 … ‘the music customarily used’ for performances on the English-speaking stage” (Foakes, ed. 15).3 Mendelssohn’s score was used for the first ballet from the play, choreographed in one act by Marius Petipa for the Hermitage Theatre in St Petersburg in 1876 and revised by Michel Fokine in 1906 for a student performance.