Benjamin Millepied’s Wide-Ranging Reimagining of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Comes to New York

About the only conventional element of acclaimed choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s site-specific Romeo & Juliet Suite, presented this month at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels festival, is the presence of an actual balcony in the iconic Shakespearean scene. The performance spills from the stage throughout the sprawling venue with what the LA Dance Project founder and New York City Ballet alum calls “live cinema,” a camera transmitting footage in real time to a screen above the proscenium. Dancers, pictured here at the Armory alongside Millepied, wear street clothes and the leads rotate fluidly, alternating among male/male, female/female, and male/female pairings for each performance. Unlike past tour stops from La Seine Musicale to the Sydney Opera House where Millepied staged the pivotal pas de deux outdoors, here the Wade Thomas Drill Hall’s balustraded balcony becomes a visual anchor, both visible at a distance and projected in intimate close-up.

Staging a new full-length Romeo and Juliet, among the last great three-act story ballets in the grand nineteenth-century tradition of Giselle and Swan Lake, takes a certain kind of audacity. Kenneth MacMillan’s swoony 1965 choreography, immortalized by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev—and, for millennial bunheads, by Julie Kent and Ethan Stiefel in the 2000 dance movie Center Stage—remains the definitive version, reliably packing opera houses worldwide. “I actually really resisted that score for a while,” the French choreographer says. Nevertheless, Millepied, who has choreographed for films including Black Swan and Dune: Part Two and has also begun directing, used an excerpt from Prokofiev’s score in a 2018 Romeo + Juliet short. In the sixteen-minute film, Margaret Qualley recites “parting is such sweet sorrow” to Shameik Moore as they run palm in palm through a quiet suburban Los Angeles neighborhood, performing a duet that moves freely through open space.

“Choreographing that short made me fall in love with the music again,” Millepied says. “Prokofiev’s score just has such amazing rhythms.” Later that year, LA Phil conductor Gustavo Dudamel invited Millepied’s company to perform during an orchestral concert of the work at Walt Disney Concert Hall. With the orchestra taking up most of the stage, Millepied drew on his short’s roaming visuals to develop choreography that utilized the Frank Gehry–designed venue’s unconventional volumes. “The fact that there is very little stage to dance on wasn’t an issue,” he says. Dancers moved through undulating corridors, foyers, and even the garden with its rose-shaped Delft porcelain fountain, while a camera transmitted the performance back into the auditorium. “Frank Gehry came to a performance, and he felt that his building really came to life in a way that he hadn’t experienced with other productions,” Millepied recalls.

Millepied says the open space at the Armory looks “the most like a movie set” of any theater he has worked in. The drill hall, which once served the Seventh Regiment, features roughly fifty-five-thousand square feet of column‑free space beneath a soaring vaulted ceiling, where Romeo and Tybalt grapple in the steel‑like forest beneath purpose-built risers. On the entrance side facing Park Avenue are significant period rooms, originally used by officers and designed by some of the most prominent nineteenth‑century architects and designers, including Stanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany, featuring rich wood paneling, decorative plasterwork, stained glass, and other ornate details. “The thing that’s most special about this production is that these rooms all have double doors and Romeo and Juliet can run down the entire block unobstructed,” Millepied says.

Van Cleef & Arpels’s support for Millepied builds on a longstanding engagement with dance that stretches back nearly seven decades. The Arpels brothers, Claude and Pierre, were close friends of New York City Ballet co-founder George Balanchine, and his visits to the maison’s Fifth Avenue flagship inspired the 1967 ballet Jewels. This dialogue continued decades later, in 2012, when Van Cleef & Arpels gave early support to Millepied’s company. Today, the Dance Reflections foundation, launched in 2020, carries that legacy forward, nurturing daring contemporary choreography and bringing dance to new audiences through international festivals that have spanned London, Hong Kong, and Kyoto. “Presenting Romeo & Juliet Suite in this new iteration of the Festival in New York embodies this commitment,” says Serge Laurent, the director of dance and culture programs. “Millepied’s work, like the program as a whole, speaks to the evolution, richness, and diversity of today’s dance.”

When Millepied toured Romeo & Juliet Suite in France, the work sparked debate for its queer reimagining of classical story ballets, all of which have long been structured around prince and princess meet-cutes and other similarly heteronormative narratives. Millepied’s initial motivation was personal and practical: “I have a lot of queer dancers in my own company, and so many friends in the dance world,” he recalls. “I thought, Why is it that these universal love stories can only be told through the lens of a man and a woman’s relationship?” Now making its New York premiere, the production continues to foreground these choices on stage. “I think being present in the same room without a telephone for an hour and a half and experiencing something together is urgent,” Millepied adds. “That feels like a political act.”

Romeo & Juliet Suite continues through March 21 at the Park Avenue Armory, New York.