Prospect recommends: Dance

 

BalletBoyz at the Linbury. © Hugo Glendinning

Juliet & Romeo Sadler’s Wells, 24th-27th September

Romeo and Juliet has inspired an awful lot of ballets. This year alone has seen a monumental in-the-round version for English National Ballet, Scottish Ballet’s radical modern reworking and the Mariinsky Ballet’s fossilised Soviet version. Now Royal Swedish Ballet presents Mats Ek’s contemporary take, Juliet & Romeo. Commissioned by the company—the fourth oldest in the world—to celebrate its 240th anniversary last year, Ek’s work is set in a dark urban world suffused with menace. Pitched somewhere between West Side Story and Baz Lurhman’s Romeo & Juliet, this inventive version takes its cue from the play’s final lines: “For never was a story of more woe/than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” This is Juliet’s story, above all else.

Steeped in the classical repertoire (he has remade Swan Lake and Giselle) Ek’s ballets respond to the modern world by shifting the balance between contemporary modes of dance and the formal elements of the past. The bleak urban setting might be anywhere from Damascus to Detroit yet the flowing cloaks and hats of the Grand Ball invoke the aesthetic flamboyance of the Renaissance. Just to unsettle preconceptions further, Ek dispenses with Sergei Prokofiev’s score in favour of a Pyotr Tchaikovsky tapestry, adapted and woven together by Anders Hogstedt to create an alternative Romeo & Juliet closer to the play than the subsequent ballets.

Manon Royal Opera House, from 26th September

Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 masterpiece gets a welcome revival by Royal Ballet’s finest. One of the great neo-classical ballets of the 20th century it’s right up there with John Cranko’s Onegin and just as devastating.

BalletBoyz Linbury Studio, from 16th September

The tough, tender all-male dance group, The Talent, rampage across the stage in a triple bill of works custom made for them by the sharpest modern choreographers, including Kristen McNally and Christopher Wheeldon.