PNB Company dancers in Roméo et Juliette. Photo © Angela Sterling

It's a remarkable work...like no 'Romeo and Juliet' ballet you’ve seen before: It's intricate, often achingly beautiful, and never simply pretty." —The Seattle Times

Sold-out performances and glowing reviews followed PNB's West Coast premiere of Jean-Christophe Maillot's Roméo et Juliette. Praised as "seamlessly fusing the vocabularies of ballet and modern dance... an astonishing and absorbing view of an old world with all the impetus of the new" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), the ballet's stylized movement and avant-garde design narrow focus to the core of Shakespeare's tragedy with intensity that equals Sergei Prokofiev's passionate score. Maillot drives the story's large-scale plot elements with action that is distinctly cinematic in nature, and he employs the production's lustrous simplicity to underscore and balance its character definitions. Most significantly, Roméo et Juliette's fearless depiction of the elation and devastation of young love demands such a high degree of commitment from its principals that audiences rushed to multiple performances, eager to witness every moment in the evolution of a major PNB artist.

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Roméo et Juliette Details