Romeo & Juliet

The Australian Ballet
2020 Digital Season
Friday 1st – Thursday 14th May, 2020

This production was filmed on Wednesday 21st September, 2011 at Arts Centre Melbourne with Orchestra Victoria

Concept and choreography: Graeme Murphy
Creative: Janet Vernon
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Costume design: Akira Isogawa
Set design: Gerard Manion
Lighting design: Damien Cooper
Projection design: Jason Lam
Music Performed by Orchestra Victoria
Music Director & Chief Conductor: Nicolette Fraillon
Concertmaster: Adam Chalabi

Juliet: Madeleine Eastoe
Romeo: Kevin Jackson
Mercutio: Daniel Gaudiello
Benvolio: Jacob Sofer
Tybalt: Andrew Killian
Paris: Ben Davis
Lord Capulet: Damien Welch*
Lady Capulet: Amy Harris
Holy Man: Jarryd Madden
Juliet’s nurse: Elizabeth Hill*
Prince of Darkness: Adam Bull
Prince of Peace: Tristan Message*
Lord Montague: John-Paul Idaszak
Lady Montague: Alice Topp
Betrothed: Karen Nanasca, Chengwu Guo

Love is Not Blind, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Romeo & Juliet, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.

Memory is not linear. Have I told you this before? I saw this production of see Graeme Murphy’s Romeo & Juliet, filmed on Wednesday 21st September, 2011 at Arts Centre Melbourne with Orchestra Victoria, before I wrote my first piece for Fjord Review.

Memory tells me I saw this very version, starring Madeleine Eastoe as Juliet and Kevin Jackson as Romeo, from row H in the State Theatre as it was filmed. But memory is porous and subjective. My memory also tells me my primary school teacher took our grade 1 class to see KISS perform a special matinee. Have I told you this before?

Beyond a band name being a reference to a kiss between “a pair of star-cross’d lovers”, my memory of KISS has little to do with Romeo & Juliet and everything to do with it, for our memories are not giant archives to leaf through, but associative and unfixed. Each time we recall a memory, it alters to accommodate new information we have since received. And as we lay down new memories, we rewrite them to fit with our own understanding of them. Our ability to reconfigure our memories is not a fault, but a means for future creative growth; just as Aristotle described, our memories are less archives of our lives, more tools for the imagination[i].

My memory has reconfigured to tell me I was there on the night this ballet was filmed and no searching for my ticket stub and programme will “pierce the fearful hollow of thine ear” and tell me otherwise. Presented as part of The Australian Ballet’s 2020 Digital Season, thanks to SBS Archives & Philippe Charluet from Stella Films, I was curious to see if and how reality could be suspended, as I revisited Shakespeare’s universal tale of young love and age-old hate from the comfort of my lounge room, seven-weeks into self-isolation, and in the middle of the day. But then this moment too will one day be a memory. When I next get to actually sit inside the State Theatre it will be radically different to the last time, but I am hopeful I’ll be able to see ballet performed live there once more.

All of this I carried with me to Romeo & Juliet reimagined by Murphy. I turned off my phone, and rewound to 2011, before Eastoe and Daniel Gaudiello (as Mercutio) et al. retired or left the company. It was surprising easily to find myself within the stone walls of Verona. And easier still, from first blush to final devastation, to move to an ice ball Antarctica, a temple in South East Asia, a bazaar in India, and a tomb in the Australian desert[ii]. It might have taken a little longer to lose my head, but lose it I still did. I echo Murphy’s Choreographic Note, written in 2011, but true today: “This timeless tale is in fact a tale for ALL times. LOVE transforms and transcends, opening a door to reveal a different world, where time bends and stretches and landscapes appear both familiar and foreign.”[iii]

In fact, maybe I was even capable of feeling the moonlight on my face a little bit more than I did all those years ago. Right now, with theatres, museums, and galleries closed, I willingly opened this door to this real, un-real world. In an interview Murphy gave during the making of Romeo & Juliet, he commented that once you open the door to love, things never appear the same again, and this seems in accordance to where we find ourselves today: unable to see things the same again. “There’s a whole reassessment of who you are, where you are, how you are, what time does, and [Murphy is playing] with that fluidity, because if you believe in [Romeo and Juliet’s] journey, then you can believe in the fantasy worlds [Murphy is] taking you in and out of”[iv]. Shape-shifting with ease, from movements light and buoyant to syncopated beats, here, I can read Shakespeare without words, and in Prokofiev’s score, the story is not told to music but rather in music.

To paraphrase Murphy, traditionally, in classical ballet, you fight gravity, you defy gravity, you float above it, you get en pointe so you don’t look like you are attached to the floor; whereas contemporary dance really loves that the ground is the source of your jump, your energy, and you are akin to a plant taking nutrients from the earth. Murphy’s “Romeo & Juliet” asks the dancers to be both because they can be both. And by accepting that one minute you are above the floor and the next minute upon it, the dimensions change, and you are in a third dimension, and that can only be a beautiful thing for a dancer to experience and by turn convey to the audience[v]. Together with Creative, Janet Vernon, working with two sets of eyes with one central meeting point, finding new ways of interpreting the classical technique gives us a new representation of what ballet can be.

Hypnotised by the artistry, wooed by the dramatic layers in the original text and score, I embellished my memories with sequins boiled in water so as to make them curl like petals (in costumes by Akira Isogawa). All lights and two beings dancing together for all eternity[vi].

(In Australia) you could revisit or be introduced to Romeo & Juliet until the 14th of May.

To be followed by:
Triple Bill Program
Waramuk (Page) Dyad 1929 (McGregor) Narrative of Nothing (Murphy)
Untill Thursday 28th of May
Paquita (Petipa) & La Sylphide (Bournonville)
Thursday 28th May – Thursday 11th June

[i] Claudia Hammond, ‘Most of us tend to think of time as linear, absolute and constantly “running out” — but is that really true? And how can we change our perceptions to feel better about its passing?’, BBC Future, published 4th December, 2019, accessed 9th May, 2020.

[ii] Rose Mulready, ‘Romeo & Juliet Viewing Notes’, published 30th April, 2020, accessed 9th May, 2020.

[iii] Graeme Murphy, Choreographer’s Note, The Australian Ballet Romeo & Juliet cast sheet, accessed 9th May, 2020.

[iv] Graeme Murphy [transcribed from audio interview], ‘Graeme Murphy’s Romeo & Juliet: A New Vision’, screened for free as part of The Australian Ballet’s 2020 Digital Season, accessed 9th May, 2020.

[v] Graeme Murphy [transcribed from interview], ‘Graeme Murphy’s Romeo & Juliet: A New Vision’, screened for free as part of The Australian Ballet’s 2020 Digital Season.

[vi] “Hopefully we get out there and move people, and tell them a story. If I can do that, and people are crying at the end, I’ve done my job. I think [Eastoe and I are] both eager to get on the stage because it stops it from being eyes around the studio, very close to you, watching every little thing you do. But when you are on stage, it’s just lights, and a black box, and you and your partner; and that’s when you can really let that chemistry go, and that’s when suddenly it becomes two beings dancing together on the stage.”
Kevin Jackson [transcribed from interview], ‘Graeme Murphy’s Romeo & Juliet: A New Vision’, screened for free as part of The Australian Ballet’s 2020 Digital Season.

* Guest artist

Additional Guest Artists: Colin Peasley, Frank Leo, Megan Connelly

This production is brought to you free by The Australian Ballet’s Production Partner Herbert Smith Freehills.

Produced by STUDIO, an SBS Subscription Channel, in association with FOXTEL.

This performance of Romeo & Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev was given by permission of Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd, exclusive agents for Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd of London.

Image credit: Kevin Jackson and Madeleine Eastoe in Graeme Murphy’s Romeo & Juliet, 2011, by Jeff Busby