When Benjamin Millepied premiered Romeo & Juliet Suite in Paris in 2022, the superstar French dancer and choreographer caused quite a stir.
The 46-year-old – best known for choreographing the movie Black Swan, and his short tenure at the helm of the world’s oldest ballet company, Paris Opera Ballet – admits he might have been naïve about how French audiences would react to his radical take on a classic.
“I never thought that we would have this kind of response,” he says.
Benjamin Millepied’s Romeo & Juliet Suite will make its Australian premiere in June.
In Romeo & Juliet Suite, on any given evening, Shakespeare’s “star-cross’d lovers” Romeo and Juliet are played by a man and a woman, two men, or two women.
“It was actually fascinating for me,” Millepied says. “People were saying, ‘How dare he make Romeo and Juliet with two men?’ ‘Who the f--- does he think he is?’
“You had families who came with their kids, and kids that were thrilled to see two women on stage, and then parents arguing with the kids, or husbands who came with their wives who were like, ‘Why am I sitting through two men doing Romeo and Juliet?’”
Since its sold-out Paris debut, the critically lauded Romeo & Juliet Suite has toured Los Angeles and will travel to South Carolina in May, before landing at Sydney Opera House in June – a return to the place Millepied called home from 2020-21 as he filmed his directorial debut Carmen (then-wife Natalie Portman was shooting Thor: Love and Thunder in Australia at the same time).
Millepied says he felt compelled to approach Romeo and Juliet in a fresh way: “When I started to think about making it, it just made no sense to do it just for a man and a woman.
Benjamin Millepied: “I never thought that we would have this kind of response.”Credit: Dorian Prost
“Even though that’s the original story, I have a company of dancers with completely different lives who love men or women: I felt like it just had to be representative of love in general. It’s not a political act.”
The production’s take on gender and sexuality is just one element that makes it unlike any Romeo and Juliet you’ve seen before. Another is how Millepied uses live video to take audiences to other parts of the theatre and to show close-ups of the dancers.
“It really is special in the way that the production uses the space and gives this experience to the viewer that’s not just a regular proscenium experience. It’s really between dance and dance that becomes cinema before their eyes,” he says.
The choreographer was inspired to combine dance and cinema after listening to Sergei Prokofiev’s iconic score – music he first heard as a teenager studying ballet in Lyon, France. It prompted him to think about music for film, especially the work of Bernard Herrmann, the composer behind movies including Psycho and Citizen Kane.
“I had heard [the score] so much I really didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” he says. “It had become almost elevator music to me … I had to learn to love it again.”
He considered making a movie using the score, initially shooting a short film starring actor and dancer Margaret Qualley. Then, in 2018, he choreographed the balcony scene to accompany performances by the LA Philharmonic; there wasn’t much room for the dancers on stage, so they moved through the Walt Disney Concert Hall, followed by a camera. It was the seed for his Romeo & Juliet Suite.
Nayomi Van Brunt and David Adrian Freeland Jr will make their Australian debut.Credit: Diego Uchitel
Millepied knew he didn’t want to make a traditional version of Romeo and Juliet. “When really dramatic stories are told in dance, I don’t really like when they’re told in a literal way, or in kind of an old-fashioned way,” he says.
Instead, he wanted to create a sense of intimacy between the audience and the dancers through film. “With a camera, you can make realism and drama much, much more realistic,” Millepied says. “I thought it would be an interesting way to combine the emotions on stage and drama, like murder on stage.”
He singles out the balcony pas de deux between Romeo and Juliet, which, in his production, sees the couple move outside. In moments like these, not only are the skills of the dancers at play, but those of the camera operator. “The camera is dancing with the dancers,” Millepied says. “They’re sweeping and moving and turning with the dancers, and it’s just very, very choreographed.”
The upcoming Sydney season of Romeo & Juliet Suite marks the debut of Millepied’s dance company LA Dance Project in Australia.
Millepied was inspired to start the not-for-profit company in response to his experience in other institutions, including at the New York City Ballet, founded by famed choreographer George Balanchine.
“I tell the dancers when they get in that I love them already and that they don’t have anything to prove to me,” he says. “It’s really about making them feel confident from the go. I never, ever try to make them feel insecure.”
When really dramatic stories are told in dance, I don’t really like when they’re told in a literal way, or in kind of an old-fashioned way.
That attitude is distinct from the formal dance training he received while growing up in France and the US.
Born in Bordeaux in 1977, Millepied moved to Lyon at 13 to study at the Conservatoire National. At 15, he started training at the School of American Ballet in New York. While he was studying there, he won the international dance competition, the Prix de Lausanne.
He joined the New York City Ballet at 18, becoming a soloist in 1998 and principal dancer in 2002, performing in works by Balanchine, Peter Martins and Christopher Wheeldon. He left the company nine years later, in 2011, and co-founded LA Dance Project in 2012.
“[The New York City Ballet] was led through fear,” he recalls. “It was an environment where only the strongest survived and thrived, but otherwise you could really be crushed.
“I was driven. I was talented. I was tolerant to that kind of stuff more than other kids, due to my background: I left for boarding school when I was 13. I was one of the kids who could.
“Even so, there’s a lot of stuff I could have benefited from, like care from responsible adults, like accompaniment and care and to look out for the people who come and join the dance company who are like [aged] 17, 18, 16. They’re far from home. They’re in a competitive environment. It was very much swim or sink, you know?”
As the leader of a dance company, Millepied wants to make his dancers feel celebrated and empowered to perform with authenticity.
“It really is about feeling things internally, with truth, that makes the audience care and watch you,” he says.
“[It’s about] making the dancers, the humans that I have in the studio, feel like who they are and what they have to express is really worthy.”
Romeo & Juliet Suite is at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House from June 5 to 9.