Romeo + Juliet ... Without Words
Of Moving Colors tells the timeless teenage love story through dance
“You don’t have to move constantly, I need you to find moments of stillness,” Pavel Zustiak instructs his cadre of four dancers—Romeo, Rosaline, Juliet, and Paris—as they rotate a metal scaffold set on wheels. New York City-based Zustiak, artistic director of Palissimo, is the guest choreographer for a scene in the upcoming dance adaptation of Romeo and Juliet by local contemporary dance company Of Moving Colors.
“I wanted to do Shakespeare since the second year the company was founded,” says OMC’s artistic director Garland Goodwin Wilson, observing the dancers from a perch on a pile of folded gymnastic mats. “The timing was right.”
In a large, mirrored dance studio tucked behind Billy Heroman’s on Perkins Road, atmospheric piano-and-string compositions by Olafur Arnalds (the working soundtrack for OMC’s production) compete with Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” in the adjacent studio. The dancers seem unaffected by the cacophony. It is the first hour in Zustiak’s three-day residency; he was brought in to set the choreography for the ball scene in which Romeo and Juliet meet. But in OMC’s version, Romeo dances with a usually unseen Rosaline as a way to establish Romeo’s obsession for her, which he only describes in the original.
“So I went through the script and we structured the trios and quartets and duets or big scenes almost identically to the script,” explains Wilson. “There are a couple of things that—when you take away words and you put it in a dance and you’re not doing a literal narrative like a ballet—I felt were important to establish. That’s why I wanted Rosaline and Romeo to have a duet, because in the script, he’s in love with Rosaline and thinking about her and talking about her. Yet, there’s not really an encounter for them in the script; it’s all through text.”
Dance, notoriously ephemeral, is the most difficult art form to describe, especially the uncodified contemporary strands. Yet descriptive phrases and onomatopoeia—and, yes, scenes—rise organically to fill the gaps. “And juhm, and lift, and fahm,” Zustiak counts. “Don’t make the lumberjack preparation, yah?” he adds, taking a ridiculous plié position.
Zustiak asks them to try a movement first with the right hand, then the left. “Can I just see that leg?” The dancers oblige, following his direction and playing on the metal structure—ten years old again, but graceful. Then, like a mass of disorganized atoms suddenly snapping into molecular formation, a dance sequence emerges, and the dancers set the first few minutes of the ball scene, ending with the meeting of Romeo and Juliet.
Details. Details. Details.
7:30 pm on April 21 and 22 Manship Theatre 100 Lafayette Street manshiptheatre.org $13–$35