On Love and Mortality

What’s special about Rudi van Dantzig’s “Romeo and Juliet” is how deeply it is steeped in the textures of popular devotion and everyday life, reminiscent of Flemish painting in its chiaroscuro and crowded humanity. The curtain rises on an oneiric, slightly crumbling vision of Verona, a stage masterfully conceived by Toer van Schayk, who designed both sets and costumes. Across the twelve scenes and three acts, the décor transforms, revealing new colours, fabrics, and moods with each ensemble. Even the children from the ballet school join the bustle on stage, bringing a touch of freshness and candid expressivity to the scene. Some costume elements—lovingly restored over the years, their textures lending the production a quiet patina of memory—date back to the original 1967 premiere of van Dantzig’s production.

Performance

Dutch National Ballet: “Romeo and Juliet” by Rudi van Dantzig

Place

Dutch National Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 14, 2025

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Olga Smirnova and Jacopo Tissi in “Romeo and Juliet” by Rudi van Dantzig. Photograph by Altin Kaftira

A dancer, choreographer, and author, van Dantzig accompanied Dutch National Ballet for two decades (serving as its sole artistic director from 1971 to 1991) and was renowned for pushing dancers beyond their limits—qualities that permeate this “Romeo and Juliet,” making it a condensation of feeling and emotion, a passionate meditation on love, mortality, and the social hierarchies and moral rigidity of Verona. Such is his realism and his fascination with the texture of everyday life that the protagonists emerge not as archetypes or victims of fate, but of a world ruled by power and decorum.

Soon after the overture, a statue of a dark Virgin Mary is carried in procession—a striking image that immediately sets the tone of popular fervour, where religion and everyday chaos intertwine. Festive processions and sorrowful rituals populate this oxymoronic world of joy and pain. Extremes coexist in van Dantzig’s vision of the two lovers’ tale: tragedy and comedy meet at every step, giving the performance the texture of lived experience. Opposites also resonate in the dramaturgical dialogue between characters. Jacopo Tissi’s Romeo is pure, melancholic, and poetic—a dreamer, just as van Dantzig conceived him. Giorgi Potskhishvili’s Tybalt radiates a feline, sensuous energy, his temperament fiery, almost too vivid for the measured choreography that seems barely able to contain him. The contrast between the two dancers transcends their roles; it unfolds as a dialogue of temperaments between artists of profoundly different natures. One can only look forward to seeing how Potskhishvili will interpret Romeo in future performances.

Olga Smirnova’s Juliet is exquisitely detailed; this gifted interpreter, startling in her technical precision, brings to life the most psychologically nuanced character on stage—one who evolves from girlish innocence, through total surrender to love, to existential despair within the span of three acts. At first timid and prudish, she leaps into her maid’s lap (Nicola Jones) whenever her delicate sensibility is startled, to the audience’s delight. The presence of a little page during her bedroom scene makes her innocence all the more touching. As the story unfolds, we see that direct experience plays a crucial role in Juliet’s maturation: she catches glimpses of what love might be as she secretly watches the courtesans kiss, and later learns to move to the sound of the mandolin, joining the other girls at the family masked ball and letting herself be gently guided by them. In van Dantzig’s vision, it is the world around her—with its expectations and constraints—that conspires to shape her inner life.

Olga Smirnova and Jacopo Tissi in “Romeo and Juliet” by Rudi van Dantzig. Photograph by Altin Kaftira

When faced with Paris, her promised groom, and with men in general, Juliet carries a pure, instinctive fear, almost that of a wild creature. She shows a similar retreat when she first meets Romeo, though this time not out of fear but from the depth of her feeling—a sincere and sudden love that Smirnova conveys with disarming delicacy. Tissi’s Romeo is poetic, elusive, lyrical rather than passionate: refined, with impeccable lines and seamless jumps, turns of crystalline precision. Together, he and Smirnova, long in their lines and luminous in their presence, seem to reach toward infinity. In the balcony pas de deux, with the balcony set unusually low, their reverie is interrupted by a comic intrusion that breaks the spell precisely at the musical climax—the moment of highest pathos when, in MacMillan’s version, the lovers are entangled in passion. Here, the plump, anxious maid rushes in to call Juliet back inside, creating a strange dissonance. This device works particularly well to counterbalance the almost unattainable perfection of Smirnova and Tissi—so statuesque, so cool, so unreachable. It proves once again that van Dantzig’s equilibrium between drama and humour, buffoonery and tragedy, is what gives the ballet its humanity.

Van Dantzig’s staging refines the traditional contrast between Romeo’s two friends: the calm, level-headed Benvolio (Joseph Massarelli) and the impulsive, fiery Mercutio (Edo Wijnen) form a delightful counterpoint. Wijnen captivates with his charismatic energy and effortless musicality, his movements imbued with wit and spontaneity. His death scene, when he is struck by Tybalt’s spade and slowly loses consciousness and control of his body, recalls the harrowing, drawn-out deaths of “Giselle” or “La Bayadère”—moments similarly surrounded by the choral despair of the community—and is executed with masterful finesse. Earlier, in the bustling marketplace scene, he playfully mocks a giant skeleton figure (Bela Erlandson); yet even in this moment of humour, the shadow of death already hovers over him, foreshadowing his fate.

Death permeates the production from the very beginning; rather than a rupture, it is conceived as part of the same continuum of vibrant life that animates the streets of Verona. At the opening of the first act, after the initial brawl, two corpses remain onstage, one of them a villager mourned by a woman and child at the edge of the scene, setting a tone of quiet foreboding. In the final act, as Juliet runs through the night to seek Friar Laurence’s help in escaping the marriage arranged by her parents, the ghosts of Mercutio and Tybalt return for a macabre pas de trois with her—an eerie and original invention by van Dantzig that seals the ballet’s vision of existence as a perpetual dance between life and death, this world and the next.

Olga Smirnova and Jacopo Tissi in “Romeo and Juliet” by Rudi van Dantzig. Photograph by Altin Kaftira

The opposition between Montagues and Capulets is rendered through palette and posture: the former appear in pale, airy tones, mingling freely with the townspeople; the latter in sumptuous purples, standing apart among their own. In the choreography, the Montagues’ popular dances feel more fluid and engaging than the Capulets’ stately knife dance—intentionally stripped of grandeur, perhaps, to reveal the human fragility beneath their pride. A tambourine dance for two men and four women—familiar from Leonid Lavrovsky (whom van Dantzig openly acknowledged as an influence) and Yuri Grigorovich—enlivens the middle act. Emma Mardegan shines within the group with radiant joy, while Robin Park and Jenson Blight captivate with their exuberant jumps.

The entire corps de ballet of Dutch National Ballet delivers a masterful performance. Van Dantzig’s choreography may appear simple—filled with arabesques, grand jetés, and tours en attitude—yet it serves the dramaturgy with remarkable clarity. Though the work may at times feel long, it ultimately draws you in so completely that fiction and reality dissolve, and you find yourself weeping with the protagonists. When Juliet cradles Romeo’s head in her lap, the emotion is overwhelming: she becomes once again the innocent child of the beginning, crying in despair. Here, Prokofiev’s score, played by the Dutch Ballet Orchestra under Koen Kessels, deepens the sense of tragic inevitability. Its themes are charged with emotional tension, where love and violence, hope and despair are inseparably entwined—a sound world that binds the lovers’ fate to the larger pulse of life and death that van Dantzig renders with such deep humanity on stage.

What remains, above all, is Juliet’s solitude: a girl who becomes a woman before our eyes, and who, despite the throng of courtiers, courtesans, friends, the Friar, the maid, her parents, Paris, and even Romeo, ends up utterly, heartbreakingly alone. The maid keeps treating her as a child until the very end, her parents remain enchanted by the dictates of social convention, and her promised groom, Paris, is blinded by furious disappointment. This is the final and most poignant opposition: amid the colourful panorama of dances and characters, Juliet stands apart. She is alone as she grows, alone in her family home, alone when she returns after her secret marriage, alone when she loves, and alone when she dies. Those around her are emotionally remote, and the splendour of her world becomes her cage.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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