As befits what is revealed of Cranko’s artistic process—lying on the floor, coiled around a record player, pausing, taking the needle back to a section, as he choreographs the visuals that float upon the music’s serenity—the film repeatedly dissolves into the sublime, yearning lullaby of the Andante slow movement of Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major Op. 83[7]. For in the nocturnal phases of both, an exchange of ideas comes to the fore: transcendence. “Human movement has limitations,” muses Riley’s Cranko. “You have to transform this extremely physical image into a spiritual kind of expression. With all great ballets, the flesh becomes the spirit before the audience’s eyes. And the audience believes, without completely understanding what it really believes in.”

A sense of this is further illustrated when Cranko, having met set and costume designer Jürgen Rose in the company’s canteen, begins to see his “Romeo and Juliet” materialise. To Cranko, Shakespeare gives us room to interpret, to look to renaissance paintings for inspiration, because “he doesn’t describe the place in Verona where Mercutio dies. But he gives us his character and his wonderful words. He speaks out and we [through the transformative potentiality of dance] show it.” As the dancers burst through the doors, the saturated colour palette of the medieval marketplace of Act Two, Scene Three, springs to life. As Cranko calls “stop,” he and Rose walk through the freeze frame as they orchestrate the duel where Mercutio wishes to defend his friend Romeo against Tybalt. “Shakespeare gives us so few words about the death of Mercutio. We’ll make a dance of death.” He clasps his hands loudly overhead, for the scene to recommence and Mercutio to begin his famous ‘but a scratch’ dance of death. Cranko and Erikson (as Madsen playing Mercutio) mirror one another, as Cranko focuses his vision, which we later experience on the stage to the rousing familiarity of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights.  

The camera takes me from my seat in the audience into the action on stage. The camera moves throughout the cast as if a performer with its back to the audience might, only to spin and show the vantage of the performer, the illuminated auditorium in all its breath-held glory. Changing viewpoints and focus repeatedly, the unknown role creates an air of excitement as befits Cranko’s breakthrough story ballet. “Give it your all,” he encourages. The camera now upon Badenes as Juliet, up so close that I am no longer in the audience but, in a sense Badenes herself. With the camera low, looking up at Badenes, picking up her every breath, the successful transformation of physical into spiritual is no easy feat. “Lots of people can do steps. Few can dance.” In the constant shifting of perspective, a beautifully full and confused sense of everything all at once equalling a whole is experienced.