skygiants | (no subject)

Last night we went to go see The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which I am going to attempt to write up very hastily because tonight is the LAST night it's in Boston and it was great so if anyone is inspired to make a last-minute booking they have the chance.

This is an all-dance essentially ballet production; no idea how it would have read or how comprehensible it would be if one was not familiar with The Story of Hamlet but as someone who does know the Story of Hamlet, it does a really beautiful job at being a Hamlet -- one of the friends I was with said afterwards 'I could hear the soliloquies in my head when Hamlet was doing solos' and I definitely also experienced that effect.

The cast was pared down to Hamlet, Horatio, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and R&G, and each of them had their own specific dance style that evoked their character. R&G in particular I thought were really striking, a sort of matched slithery jester style that involved a very different kind of physicality from Horatio or Laertes, and Horatio's style was sort of similar to theirs but a much more classical ballet jester with cartwheels and so on -- there was one part where they were dancing a pas de trois where they were all essentially dancing the same, and then Claudius shooed Horatio away and R&G immediately got slitherier. Horatio and Hamlet also did the play-within-a-play as a pas de deux, backs facing the audience with horrible comic mask-faces for the king and queen in the play on the backs of their heads, and it was so funny and creepy and fantastically disorienting.

Ophelia was fantastic, the Ophelia-Laertes-Polonius relationship was very intense -- Polonius was a sort of classical ballet wizard with a big staff that he used in all his dancing, which I thought was very funny but also very effective -- and Ophelia's madness was a really beautiful and awful sequence with mirrors and all of the cast emerging out of them, first just hands grabbing for her and then everyone surrounding her and pulling her in different directions. (The show was Not leaning away from incest vibes in all directions either, Hamlet planted one on Gertrude's lips at the end of Polonius' death scene; afterwards another friend was like 'maybe I am forgetting the plot of Hamlet but who was the woman in the room when he killed Polonius? Isn't that normally his mom??' WELL.)

The ballet also added a couple of dance bits to evoke scenes that are not actually in Shakespeare's script and thus heighten relationships; there's one that I loved when Laertes goes away to France that's Laertes going in one direction with his little rucksack and Hamlet and Horatio coming the other way after having just seen the ghost, and they pass each other agonizingly slowly and then have a fraught farewell handshake, and then during the dancing with Ophelia's corpse scene (POOR OPHELIA, they are straight-up hauling that actress around and fighting over her limp body while Horatio chases after Hamlet like 'PLEASE CHILL OUT, PLEASE BE NORMAL') there's a part where Hamlet and Laertes just kind of fall into each other's arms for a moment and cling and start to grieve together and then Claudius runs up and hauls them away from each other and they start fighting again. Gertrude also gets a beautiful little solo bit to change into mourning clothes for Ophelia's funeral where she dances in a fraught way with Hamlet's sword and is doing the sort of rocking-a-baby ballet motion, which despite having no words is a really nice bit of Gertrude interiority that you don't usually get.

Let's see, what else ... oh, the ghosts! The ghosts are all done with big tricks of shadow and light and are extremely, extremely cool. Also Horatio steals the tablecloth to pretend to be a ghost during the big breakfast scene to try and explain to Hamlet what's going on and it's very cute. I think the thing that worked least was the big finale, which looked extremely cool (Laertes and Hamlet both had big long streamers attached to their swords and they fought with them) but did make it very difficult to track who was poisoned at any given time. But overall strong recommend for Hamlet enjoyers and very curious to hear what anyone who was not previously a Hamlet enjoyer made of it if they happened to see it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

brownbetty

This sounds really cool!

From:

skygiants

It was so much fun to watch, I loved seeing how they made very specific and recognizable characterization choices just through dance styling.

From:

headstone

I'm full of jealousy! This sounds awesome.

From:

skygiants

I hope it travels around a bit so more people get to see it! I think it started in Quebec originally so it's definitely possible.

From:

hilarita

That sounds really cool! If it's ever streamed to cinema or put out on DVD (ha!), I'd be very interested to see it.

The dropping of the Fortinbras plot does put the focus very much on the relationships, which is what ballet excels at, rather than the political situation which is less amenable to balletic conventions. It's also fairly common theatrical cut (which Michael Bogdanov would not approve of!).

My current Hamlet reading (of the First Folio text) even gave me some ways in which you could interpret the Polonius/Ophelia relationship as incest. It's a bit of a reach, but no doubt someone has done it. Hamlet/Gertrude is a fairly common interpretation, though I can understand that one might get confused by it!

From:

skygiants

I hope it does, too! It would definitely be fun for more people to be able to see it.

Yeah, I think it would be a lot more challenging for ballet to convey the Fortinbras element, lol. (Even R&G's Death By Voyage To England had to be VERY vibes-only.)

They were definitely leaning in on Gertrude/Hamlet and I think arguably on Ophelia/Laertes -- we had some discussion afterwards about whether that was really intentional incest vibes, or whether some of that is just inevitable in a pas de deux. What I was struck by particularly though is how Ophelia and Laertes abruptly stop their pas de deux and jump to stand stiffly side by side when Polonius enters.

From:

halojedha

This sounds incredible, and I love your description of it. It never occurred to me that you could dance Shakespeare but I can really see it!

From:

skygiants

I've seen a couple of iterations of danced Shakespeare and they're always really fun, but this I think is definitely one of the most interesting and effective ones I've come across!

From:

musesfool

This sounds fantastic!

From:

skygiants

A lot of really cool, smart character-driven choreography on display!

From:

troisoiseaux

OH MAN this sounds fantastic— and I had literally just admitted to myself, after a couple of good-faith tries, that I am perhaps Not A Ballet Person. (I am very much A Hamlet Person, though.)

From:

skygiants

I am often only sort of a ballet person, but

genarti very much is -- and the more full of narrative a dance performance is the more I'm likely to like it/be able to parse what it's doing that's interesting, so it's always exciting to find one that both of us think is really good!

From:

petra

Wow, thank you for writing this up! It sounds amazing.

From:

skygiants

I was really glad I got a chance to see it!

From:

princessofgeeks

Sounds amazing!

From:

skygiants

It was really cool to see!

From:

mecurtin

I sent this link to my daughter & her partner, who live in Jamaica Plain, in case it fits in their schedule. It sounds SUPER cool!

From:

skygiants

Aw, hope they got a chance to make it!

From:

sovay

there's a part where Hamlet and Laertes just kind of fall into each other's arms for a moment and cling and start to grieve together and then Claudius runs up and hauls them away from each other and they start fighting again.

This kind of interacting interiority reminds me of the production of Hamlet I saw in high school where each character had a shadow/reflection/double and also sounds really cool in its own right.

Edited Date: 2025-03-01 06:47 pm (UTC)

From:

asakiyume

That high school production with the doubles sounds really cool.

From:

sovay

That high school production with the doubles sounds really cool.

It was the first production of Hamlet I ever saw and I suspect it would have been more effective if I had actually seen at least one regular Hamlet to have formed my own ideas of what its main characters were thinking or feeling before watching them enacted by black-clad doppelgängers in Goth whiteface, but I have remembered pieces of it to this day: primarily that however regally and distantly Gertrude and Claudius appeared together in public like a marriage of state and convenience, their doubles were all over one another and occasionally the furniture with what looked like genuine affection as well as lust and a great motive for murder, and that while Hamlet was delivering "To be or not to be," his double just wandered down to the front of the stage and sat there, staring out into the audience the whole time as if seeing them where Hamlet couldn't. I don't remember how most of the other principals were handled, which is maddening. Ophelia should have been a trapped and horrified, sane observer of her own mad scene, but I am not confident that the director thought of it. I am confident of remembering that people's doubles persisted after death, so there were a whole lot of ghosts on the stage by the time the curtain fell.

From:

asakiyume

Ahaha, the dual Gertrude and Claudius sound excellent! And same with Hamlet--the double having more awareness, sensing a metaworld even as Hamlet muses on what's beyond the life he knows. And I like your imagination of how Ophelia's double should be.

From:

sovay

Ahaha, the dual Gertrude and Claudius sound excellent!

I have rejected ever since any interpretation of Gertrude and Claudius where they are not sincerely into one another.

And same with Hamlet--the double having more awareness, sensing a metaworld even as Hamlet muses on what's beyond the life he knows.

Yes! I like that way of pinpointing it.

And I like your imagination of how Ophelia's double should be.

Thank you. Maybe someone will stage it sometime.

From:

skygiants

Shadow doubles for all the characters in Hamlet sounds AMAZING, so much of that play is about the interior/exterior faces that people show to the world and grapple with inside themselves. (and honestly one of the things I love most about going to see Shakespeare is how the fact that the plays are so old and beloved is constantly pushing directors to find new and interesting ways to stage them and say new things about them.)

From:

chestnut_pod

Oh, this sounds like good stuff! I love it when different characters get different dance styles; it's such an easy shorthand but so seldom done, because it's hard to get that kind of mix! Guillaume Côté did some wonderful productions for the NBoC; I'm glad to see he's branching out.

I wonder how I'd react to the Ophelia stuff; I have strong opinions on "throw the woman around" contemporary partnering. That said, when it's Like That on purpose, as a commentary, I think it can be really effective. In fact, I'm thinking of another Shakespeare adaptation here, Wheeldon's Winter's Tale.

Glad you had this experience!!

From:

skygiants

I was really excited to get to see it at the Emerson -- the Boston Ballet has a fairly stock repertoire that alternates between Classical Ballet and collections of modern shorts and that's it, and they just don't seem super interested in a lot of full-length modern/narrative ballet, so even aside from the fact that I'm extremely interested in Hamlets it was really fun to get to see something different.

Oh, something I forgot to mention is that Horatio was cross-cast! And all the time that Ophelia was being lifted around in these dramatic pas-de-deuxes (and then quite literally hauled as a corpse around when Hamlet and Laertes were fighting over her body), Horatio was providing a sort of visual contrast in these bright, caper-y little dances that were a completely different style of partnership with Hamlet.

From:

osprey_archer

There's a stock company relatively near to me that only does Nutcracker and collections of modern shorts, so I feel your pain. Please! I want to see more narrative ballet!

From:

osprey_archer

That sounds super cool! I've seen a couple of Shakespeare ballets now and he really does seem to adapt well to the medium. Maybe because I do know the stories, maybe because the stories are about the sort of Big Emotions that dance is good at portraying?

I love your description of the Ophelia staging especially - her madness with the mirrors and the cast grabbing at her, and then after she dies everyone else literally throwing her around. It's a beautiful evocation of the way everyone in the play treats her. And interesting that Gertrude gets a little extra time to mourn her: it's clear in the play that she does care about Ophelia, but I don't know that it's often highlighted.

As you know I ALSO just saw a Hamlet on Friday, and I was really struck by Horatio's "oh god please be normal" when we get to the part where Hamlet is announcing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead and oh I'm just going to jump in Ophelia's grave now. He is truly trying SO hard. He came up to Denmark to visit his college buddy who just lost his dad and somehow this has escalated into a roomful of death??

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I think it's a combo of the fact that the stories are well-known, the stories are high-plot but often the kind of plot that can translate well to dance (though not always -- there was one bit where they put up WORDS, WORDS, WORDS for the scene where Hamlet argues with Polonius and then slid the 'S' around so it became SWORDS, SWORDS, SWORDS and had him and Polonius fight with sword and staff, lol), and it's fun to see a dancer interpret a soliloquy ...

It is so rough to be Horatio! He was just here on spring break! He has to go back to school after this! I understand why people ship Hamlet/Horatio for various reasons but mostly honestly because if Horatio wasn't getting some kind of romantic fulfillment out of all this it would simply be the worst spring break in the world for nothing!

From:

osprey_archer

Do you mean Hamlet and Laertes? I don't remember Hamlet and Polonius dueling, just Hamlet stabbing Polonius through a curtain while yelling "A RAT."

Either way I love "WORDS WORDS WORDS" becoming "SWORDS SWORDS SWORDS." Iconic.

Even if Horatio IS into Hamlet it's STILL the worst spring break ever! Hamlet jumps into Ophelia's grave and then DIES. Horatio returns to Witternberg, a ghost of himself, to fall into the comforting arms of... blanking on a Shakespeare crossover character who could comfort him... we'll draft someone into this crackfic!

From:

genarti

No, it's Hamlet and Polonius! I think they decided that rather than trying to dance out that particular verbal argument, they'd physicalize it. (And/or they were enamored of the pun.) It was a fun scene, but character-wise the heart of it to me was leaning into the violence at the heart of Hamlet's character. I honestly had forgotten the verbal argument that goes there in the original, being rather more a dance person than a Hamlet person myself.

(For a crossover boyfriend: perhaps poor Antonio, late of insufficiently requited devotion to Sebastian in Illyria?)

Edited Date: 2025-03-04 12:37 am (UTC)

From:

osprey_archer

I can't remember why Hamlet and Polonius argue, but tbh Hamlet argues with EVERYONE so why not Polonius too?

From:

asakiyume

Whoa, VERY cool! I love the idea of ballet tacking all sorts of stories--I saw a community ballet production of The Magician's Nephew once.

Polonius as a classical ballet wizard--awesome! And I like your description of R&G "a sort of matched slithery jester style"--sounds perfect!

From:

skygiants

Oh, man, I would love to see a ballet take on C.S. Lewis, that sounds fantastic! I really love interesting narrative ballet and we don't often get it here, so it was extremely fun to have the opportunity.

From:

asakiyume

As I say to Sovay below, I don't really recall any of the particulars of it except that I liked it and was impressed with the company for taking it on ... now I'm wondering whether someone in the company made it up out of their own head or whether it's the sort of thing where you can get the choreography from somewhere and then put it on yourself.

From:

sovay

I saw a community ballet production of The Magician's Nephew once.

I don't think you ever mentioned this! A ballet of The Magician's Nephew could be amazing!