Playing dead with a dancer’s grace in ‘Romeo and Juliet’

Lilyan Vigo and Timour Bourtasenkov star in Carolina Ballet's original "Romeo and Juliet." Bourtasenkov portrays Tybalt in performances here. —Courtesy Ballet Hawaii

In composer Sergei Prokofiev and dramatist Sergei Radlov’s original ballet version of “Romeo and Juliet,” the star-crossed lovers actually survive. Prokofiev responded to critics of that ending by saying, “Living people can dance, the dying cannot.”

Prokofiev, who was forced by his producers to go with Shakespeare’s tragic conclusion, might have changed his mind were he to see Lilyan Vigo and Marcelo Martinez dance the final scene of “Romeo and Juliet,” which will be performed this weekend at Blaisdell Concert Hall.

In a rehearsal of the scene last week, Vigo did a remarkable job of playing dead — more precisely, drugged to the point where she appears dead — while Martinez lifted and twirled her in a variety of positions.

“That almost hurts more than when I have to dance. My neck just kills me,” said Vigo. “I have to look limp, and I have to just relax my entire body and have my bottom half still look like a ballet dancer.

“There are times when I start to get on point but I still have to make the audience feel that I am dead, that I’m unresponsive. I really have no control, because if he carries me different, my body falls different.”

Vigo and Martinez are from Carolina Ballet, which is providing most of the lead dancers in the production. Ballet Hawaii is drawing on local talent to fill out the 30-member cast, but the production will essentially be Carolina Ballet’s, with its set, lighting director and stage manager all coming to Hawaii.

“It’s going to be attractive,” said Carolina Ballet’s Timour Bourtasenkov in an understated way. Bourtasenkov was Carolina Ballet’s original Romeo, but here he will portray Juliet’s cousin Tybalt, a role that has him “fight Mercutio, fight Benvolio, fight Romeo … (with) swords, daggers, shields. There’s a lot of stuff going on.”

At its debut in 1999, the Carolina production received critical praise for “putting into dance the poetry the lovers speak, so that when every gesture recurs you know what they are recollecting.”

ROBERT WEISS, artistic director for Carolina Ballet and the choreographer of “Romeo and Juliet,” said the challenge in creating the choreography was in communicating the essence of a story through dance instead of words.

“As soon as you leave out the words, you’ve got a problem,” he said in a phone interview. “Ballet substitutes mime for words, but in the end if there’s not enough dancing in the ballet, it doesn’t really matter.”

Nonetheless, Shakespeare and Prokofiev provided great material for him to work with, Weiss said.

“Romeo and Juliet” is “really the simplest story in the world: two feuding families, they’re in love, he kills her cousin and is banished,” he said.

“What’s great about Shakespeare’s play is not the plot, it’s the words, it’s the poetry. So how do you get that kind of poetry into dance? Basically classical ballet is a very poetic art form, so hopefully you … just figure out a way to get that poetry into dance.

“Of course, the first thing you have to do is have a score. And fortunately the thing about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is that Prokofiev wrote one of the great ballet scores of all time. That music actually really tells the story.”

Carolina Ballet's original "Romeo and Juliet." —Courtesy Ballet Hawaii

That story and the music are enough to captivate dancers, who identify with its romantic theme.

“It’s one of my favorite parts. It’s something anybody can relate to,” said Vigo. “I have to have the audience grow with me. I have to grow from a 16-year-old girl to someone who experiences death and love and gets married and becomes a woman.”

“Everybody has had experience with love,” said Martinez, a native of Paraguay who trained in Brazil. “I’m not saying it comes easy, because I have to dance with somebody and have to fall in love with somebody, but in the same way the story is so pure, so innocent, that it is so hard to not to fall in love. And the music just carries you (to) give it your best shot. There’s no doubt in the end that you’re going to hit that ecstasy.”

—Steven Mark / smark@staradvertiser.com