Romeo meets Radiohead
BECKET - Romeo and Juliet may well be our favorite tragic couple, with a tale ever tantalizing to filmmakers, theater artists, composers, and choreographers. Their story is also often tweaked: Among the notable altered-ending productions are the classic musical “West Side Story’’ (Maria lives, pondering the futility of violence) and Mark Morris’s 2008 “Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare’’ (both lovers endure, sort of, in a kind of Christian Science “death is really just an entrance into another realm’’ haze).
At Jacob’s Pillow, choreographer Edward Clug and his Slovenian company Ballet Maribor are presenting “Radio and Juliet,’’ Clug’s 2005 abstract vision of the tale. The title is a pun: Instead of using the familiar Prokofiev or Tchaikovsky scores, this dance is set to Radiohead songs. This choice of music is a great match for Clug’s movement style, the choreographic love child of William Forsythe and Twyla Tharp: His phrases feel improvisational in their casualness yet thoughtfully, sometimes even baroquely, meticulous.
Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke’s plaintive, sometimes falsetto vocals offer the perfect just off-balance pitch for Clug’s enigmatic scenes, as does the black-and-white film of Juliet that is projected on a scrim several times throughout the piece. While program notes and press releases explain some of Clug’s ideas - “what if Juliet didn’t die?’’ - the less clarified the better; the work’s rambling, almost chaotic structure has the feel of a strangely beautiful, even vaguely troubled, dream.
Clug’s Juliet is danced by the lovely Tijuana Krizman, who is vulnerably fetching in her tiny costume of laced-up corset and spandex short shorts. It’s through her that the emotional outline of the story, such as it is, unfolds. She is alternately twitchy, tense, neurotic, and luxuriantly sensual, expressing a wide range of feelings both romantic and sexual. She’s also malleable, sometimes darkly so, often flung around and pushed, rather than partnered, by various men. This suggestion of manipulation, as well as some starkly mechanical phrases, bring to mind another famous ballet character, Coppelia. The difference is that Coppelia, of course, is just a doll. The lack of Juliet’s famous tenacity is part of the heartbreak that starts to seep through Clug’s on-the-surface cool.
Though two men pair up with Krizman for pas de deux - the first duet might be the couple’s love-at-first-sight meeting, the second the balcony or perhaps the “morning after’’ scene - the cast’s six males are largely anonymous, an ever-changing sea of Romeos all dressed in black pants, shirtless under black jackets. Clug himself is democratically mixed in with the group, with a few really terrific solo moments, and one menacing man emerges as a possible Tybalt.
The men’s inscrutability is compelling: Even the fight scenes have an air of indifference, as if no one’s heart is really in the game to begin with. As if it’s not worth the effort to fight - or to love. At times, the men even dance with surgical masks covering much of their faces. At first it’s chilling, then it seems sad, as if the masks are literal barriers to keep a distance.
It’s this ultimate loneliness, the inner struggle that can make the outer connection evasive, that makes this a worthy Romeo and Juliet tale for our times. It’s dark, but despite it all, Clug seems to say, we do keep trying, like his Juliet, to live. 