the winter’s tale
Brendan Saye (Leontes), Masayu Kimoto (Polixenes), Hyo-Jung Kang (Hermione), Ensemble
CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON
“ I love the play of lightness against dark. The Winter’s Tale is a very human story, full of jealousy, horror and ultimately forgiveness.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Leontes: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughing with a sign? – a note infallible Of breaking honesty – horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift? Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing; The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing.
THE WINTER’S TALE, ACT 1, SCENE 2
Brendan Saye (Leontes)
“ romeo, we must have you dance” NASTASJA FISCHER
William Shakespeare’s works are full of dance and movement: Oberon and Titania are reconciled by dancing, Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time at a ball, satyrs dance in The Winter’s Tale, nymphs and reapers in The Tempest. Alan Brissenden, author of the monograph Shakespeare and the Dance published in 1981, notes that the English bard uses dance both as a visual image and as a dramaturgical device in order to emphasise the connection between harmony, virtue and revenge, order and disorder in the world: “Dance is an important element in Shakespeare’s plays and its significance is due in particular to its value as a symbol of harmony. The dance is used as part of the Shakespearian stage picture in a variety of ways and far more often than the ‘play within the play’ […] When he finds material for imagery in the dance it is almost always with full recognition of its symbolic value so that it contributes to the theme of a particular play or group of plays or to the presentation of the character with which it is associated. […] He was thus able to use the dance as a visual image of harmony and order in the world, and it is a movement towards that harmony, that resolution of disorder, which is the essential basis of his plays.” In this way actual dance scenes or performances not only decorate Shakespeare’s works, but verbal and metaphorical references to dance become part of their dramatic structure. Mention should be made here of Prince Florizel from The Winter’s Tale, who finds perhaps the most beautiful dancing description for his beloved
“ROMEO, WE MUST HAVE YOU DANCE”
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Perdita: “When you do dance, I wish you a wave o’th’ sea, that you might ever do nothing but that, move still, still so, and own no other function.” And of Duke Senior, who tells the lovers at the end of As You Like It: “Brides and bridegrooms dance your happiness away.” It is therefore hardly surprising that in return dance artists and choreographers have studied Shakespeare since the 18th century especially following the emergence of a new genre – the ballet d’action – and countless ballets based on his works have been created to this day: “When ballet became an independent art from during the 18th century, Shakespeare’s works were among the first literary sources that choreographers (then called ballet masters) transposed into dance. Since then, Shakespeare’s plays have inspired more story ballets than the works of any other author. In addition to the ballets that were directly based on Shakespeare’s plays, there have also been, throughout the history of ballet, a number of ballets that draw on adaptations of his works, such as rewritings of his plays, operas, and musicals”, the literary and dance scholar Iris Julia Bührle writes. Between the 16th and 18th centuries the art of ballet evolved from an aristocratic court culture into a public art form, performed under royal patronage in theatres for a paying public. The stories that were now presented on stage, although shrouded in an aristocratic aura, celebrated authority and nobility less and less and increasingly championed a humanity that was constantly resisting the rules and conventions which that authority maintained. As in Shakespeare, since the late 18th century the art of ballet has shown worlds on stage with room for a wide variety of characters and figures – appearing alongside kings and princesses or even replacing them: “The emergence of ballet for a public audience, with its narratives and characters geared to such an audience, marked the beginning of a complicated exchange back and forth between the worlds of ballet and Shakespearean drama, as Shakespeare and ballet became reciprocal influencers. Story-telling ballets obviously need stories to tell, and for the most part look for them in the realm of literature, although occasionally stories are created specifically for them. As ballet moved from court to public theatre and its subject matter adapted to its new audiences, it did not take long for the ballet world, where dance and music narrate stories from the heart and through the emotions arising from both challenging and challenged relations, to take notice of what Shakespeare could offer them”, the historian and literary scholar Nancy Isenberg explains. The ballet masters Jean-Georges Noverre, who was described by his contemporaries as the “Shakespeare of the dance”, and Gasparo Angiolini may have been the first dance artists of that period to explore Shakespeare, as they both choreographed ballets focussing on the figure of Cleopatra. While Noverre’s Cleopatra was performed in 1765 at the court of the Duke of Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, the premiere of Angiolini’s La Morte di Cleopatra took place fifteen years later at la Scala in Milan. In both cases, the source of their inspiration has not been completely proven to be Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and both differ from Shakespeare’s play in terms of content. The first proven creators of Shakespeare ballets were in 1785: Noverre’s pupil Charles Le Picq, whose Macbeth, billed as a “new heroic ballet founded on Shakespeare’s historical play”, was performed in London to music by Matthew Locke, and Eusebio Luzzi, who premiered Romeo and Juliet in Venice to music by Luigi Marescalchi. In the years that followed 39
“ROMEO, WE MUST HAVE YOU DANCE”