ROMEO & JULIET SUITE Comes to the Wallis This Month

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and L.A. Dance Project (LAPD) will present the Los Angeles premiere of LAPD’s Romeo & Juliet Suite choreographed by Benjamin Millepied to music by Sergei Prokofiev for four performances October 10 – 12, 2024 in the Bram Goldsmith Theater.
 
With this dazzling production, Millepied offers a contemporary vision of Prokofiev’s masterpiece Romeo & Juliet – a mythical take through a modern and original prism further embellished by its beautiful music. The choreographer navigates between cinema, dance, and theatre, reinterpreting Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers as young adults in an urban environment where social norms prevent them from living out their love story.
 
On stage and off, the plot unfolds using a unique projection system. Tableaux are broadcast in real-time, from unexpected places inside the theater and backstage. The dancers, filmed live, pass from stage to screen.  Each performance features a different cast and highlights diverse couples – male/female, male/male, female/female – making this version of Romeo & Juliet a universal celebration of love.
 
Millepied said, “I love the idea of using dance, live performance and cinematographic images to express a timeless story that really speaks to the audience,.  This production creates a comprehensive artistic experience while echoing current social issues, all with a cast that changes night by night.”

Roslyn Sulcas said in The New York Times, this is “a lean account of Shakespeare’s tale that … uses film to augment and intensify the drama. For Millepied, a tightly condensed narrative is the motor for an expressive, emotive physicality … fourteen of the company’s 16 dancers represent the warring families with no overt differentiation; only Romeo, Juliet, Tybalt and Mercutio are identified. There is no scenery, no hostile parents, no Paris and no Friar Lawrence.”

There are different casts playing the title roles: a heterosexual couple and two women. Sulcas continued, “It’s a simple idea but a powerful one to see represented in a ballet.  Millepied hasn’t altered the choreography or the partnering for the couples. And although there were inevitably differences of movement — the overall sense of the work and its central tragedy felt unchanged.”

“We first see the dancers offstage through a projection from a Steadicam … but once they whirl on to the stage, the narrative proceeds with rapid efficiency, the camera augmenting the crowd and fight scenes with overhead shots … after Romeo and Juliet meet, the camera follows them outside to show their swooping, ecstatic pas de deux in large-scale, close-up detail on the screen.”

“Throughout, the camera partners and bolsters, rather than dominates the dance. You could quibble about the narrative abstraction of this Romeo, but it’s a version in which the movement — and the company’s uniformly marvelous dancing — carries the story.”
 
This evening length version of L.A. Dance Project and Benjamin Millepied’s radical Romeo & Juliet Suitepremiered in 2022 at La Seine Musicale in Paris in September 2022 and had its American premiere at Segerstrom Center for the Arts May, 2023. An excerpted version of the work previewed to audiences in Los Angeles at The LA Phil in 2018 and the Hollywood Bowl in 2019.
 
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase single tickets, subscriptions and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 (Monday – Friday, 10 am to 6 pm) or visit TheWallis.org.