Juliet & Romeo

Staging & Choreography: Trajal Harrell

Zürich-Premiere: 17. December 2019, Schiffbau-Box

“Now I have stain’d the childhood of our joy with blood.” – Juliet, who was still a girl a minute ago, uses the little knowledge she has of the world to kill herself. There is no consolation for those she leaves behind. There is nothing but memories, happy memories that do not soothe their grief, but rather push it into tragedy. This realisation is the starting point for the work that Trajal Harrell has developed here. It is not just his type of choreography that seeks out the gestures and signs of tragedy which have been passed down into our contemporary popular culture. Above all, he himself as dancer and performer develops a ghostlike power and idiosyncratic temporality in his movements, making space for the tragic. In his first piece of work for a German city theatre, Trajal Harrell has joined together with an all-male ensemble of performers to appropriate Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. How can we widen, expand and sustain the tragic moment of the death (and deaths) at the end of Shakespeare’s original? How can we defend desire against the world’s contempt and against suffering? Harrell, a passionate fighter for the opacity of the world, gives back to contemporary dance its beauty, glamour and nonchalance. Theatre? Realness!