Romeo und Julia

In the organizer's words:

"Romeo and Juliet" was my first full-length action ballet in Hamburg. But I had already thought about the material during the time when I was a dancer in John Cranko's company. I didn't want to draw my inspiration from the well-known choreographies of the "Romeo and Juliet" ballets, but rather directly from Shakespeare and the sources from which he developed the material. I was looking for a quasi-realistic motivational scheme: how the characters might be, how they would have to be at a particular moment, why and why they reacted the way they did. This was to be made clear through visible situations - without words.

Originally, the contrasts of activity and passivity and of innocence and experience were important to me. Juliet is naive, innocent at the beginning, Romeo, on the other hand, is experienced. As lovers, they exchange, and each of them becomes, as it were, the other: Romeo is "disarmed" by love, Juliet finds activity out of herself. This was to be told with the means of dance. At the beginning, it seems that Juliet cannot dance. Romeo, on the other hand, already proves himself to be a skillful dancer in his first appearance. At Juliet's grave, however, he can no longer dance, and at the end, when Romeo is no longer alive, Juliet no longer dances either. So I tried not to be constricted by ballet clichés, but to translate the rich human content of Shakespeare's play into movement.

John Neumeier


Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Choreography and staging: John Neumeier
Stage design and costumes: Jürgen Rose

3 hours | 2 intermissions
1st part: 60 minutes, 2nd part: 30 minutes, 3rd part: 45 minutes

WORLD PREMIERE:
Frankfurter Ballett, Frankfurt, February 14, 1971
PREMIERE IN HAMBURG:
Hamburg Ballet, January 6, 1974
PREMIERE NEW VERSION IN HAMBURG:
Hamburg Ballet, December 23, 1981

ORIGINAL CAST:
Juliet: Marianne Kruuse
Romeo: Truman Finney
Mercutio: Max Midinet
Tybalt: Fred Howald
Benvolio: Maximo Barra
Countess Capulet: Beatrice Cordua
Count Capulet: Paul Herbinger
Count Paris: Ricardo Duse
Friar Lorenzo: Stephan Mettin
Juliet's nurse: Gertrud Schmitz

GUEST PLAYS:
1990 Genoa 2006 Cagliari 2016 Baden-Baden

IN THE REPERTOIRE:
Royal Danish Ballet
The Tokyo Ballet