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    Get Arsty

    A new Romeo and Juliet: World premiere presents plenty of star-crossed challenges for Houston Ballet

    Joseph Campana
    Feb 26, 2015 | 12:43 pm
    Houston Ballet, Romeo and Juliet
    Sketch by Roberta Guidi di Bagno.
    Courtesy of Houston Ballet

    What’s in a name?

    Many ballets go by the name Romeo and Juliet. Some are even called Juliet and Romeo, if you’re Mats Ek, Radio and Juliet if you’re Edward Clug. So when the Houston Ballet raises the curtain Thursday night on its world premiere of Stanton Welch’s Romeo and Juliet, it joins a cast of thousands.

    The story of star-crossed lovers was by no means William Shakespeare’s invention. Few of his plots were original. But somehow Shakespeare made the formerly obscure tale of Romeo and Juliet the story no one wanted to stop telling. Choreographers certainly have not resisted the temptation to bring to life a tale of tragic love between the children of two warring families.

    When we consider how often choreographers have returned to this particular well, it’s ironic, then, that when Juliet first sees Romeo at the Capulet ball she identifies him as one who “would not dance.”

    Who hasn’t made a Romeo and Juliet? Certainly there are some.

    But to name just a few of the modern luminaries: Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, John Cranko, and Kenneth Macmillan. Hamburg Ballet will perform, this summer, the Romeo and Juliet of John Neumeier, whose A Midsummer Night’s Dream dazzled Houstonians earlier this season at Houston Ballet. More recently Angelin Preljocaj, Michael Pink, Alexei Ratmasky, Mauro Bigonzetti, Mats Ek, and Edward Clug have joined the club.

    Even the inimitable George Balanchine reluctantly choreographed a scene from Romeo and Juliet as part of the ill-starred 1938 film The Goldwyn Follies, featuring jazz-dancing Montagues and balletic Capulets.

    What’s a dancer to do with the corpse of a lover? This is the challenge of the final scene.

    The balletic Romeo and Juliet begins near the turn of the 18th century but the real triumph of Romeo and Juliet as a modern masterpiece came in the wake of the collaboration between composer Sergei Prokofiev and choreographer Leonid Lavrosky based on the scenario by playwright Adrian Piotrovsky and Sergey Radlov for the Leningrad State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet.

    The music, and consequently the choreography, is organized by a series of scenes. Most work with Prokofiev’s now-definitive score, including Stanton Welch.

    Given the profusion of star-crossed lovers parading about the balletic stage, what makes a new Romeo and Juliet stand out?

    Some choreographers resituate the ballet but retain Prokofiev’s score. Thus Preljocaj sets his Romeo and Juliet in the midst of a grim police state with the lovers acting out their doomed love across classes and in the shadow of a massive dividing wall. Bigonzetti imagines a future with pairs of lovers trapped in an industrial wasteland haunted by velocity and violence but no single couple stands out.

    We’re all Romeo and Juliet in this choreographer’s mind.

    Others, like Edward Clug, work iconoclastically. In his thrilling Radio and Juliet seven Romeos join one Juliet and the music of Radiohead to render this tale of love a tragedy of soulful alienation complete with a film of Juliet, surviving her lover’s death and living on in a barren apartment.

    To stay closer to a traditional staging of Romeo and Juliet with Prokofiev’s potent score is to face the test of a series of iconic moments. Here are a few scenes I will be keeping an eye out for at Houston Ballet’s this world premiere, with some examples from Kenneth Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet, which remains one of the most performed versions.

    The Young Juliet: We meet the vibrant, sweet Juliet at the moment her parents are already attempting to marry her off. Juliet is often sprightly, teases her nurse, and prefers games and play to any talk of love and marriage.

    But Juliet’s youth is easy to overdo. It takes a delicate touch, which is just what Margot Fonteyn managed in Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet:

    The Balcony Scene. Of course Margot Fonteyn had the incomparable Rudolph Nureyev as her partner, so when it comes to the iconic balcony scene, when Romeo and Juliet fulfill the promise of their “love at first sight” encounter at the ball.

    There’s a teasing quality about this meeting. The lovers are sure and unsure at the same time, bashful and showy all at once. Balance is everything on the balcony.

    The Tomb. Nothing last forever, especially young love in a tragedy. We all know that Romeo and Juliet is, like most tragic love, a tragedy of timing. The lovers fall in love when their families are at war. The messenger misses Romeo and fails to tell him of the Friar’s plot and Juliet’s faked death. Romeo then arrives at the tomb too early and kills himself before Juliet awakes.

    What’s a dancer to do with the corpse of a lover? This is the challenge of the final scene.

    What’s in a name? If we’re talking about Romeo and Juliet, then it is a passion that burns and is extinguished in a way that quells civil strife and makes us all feel we live bigger lives than we do, at least for a moment. A rose by any other name might be as sweet as Romeo and Juliet, but it wouldn’t be quite the same.

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    A Roman Holiday (Season)

    All roads lead to Houston museum's blockbuster exhibit of Imperial Rome

    Tarra Gaines
    Jun 11, 2025 | 3:15 pm
    ​The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    Houston's holiday season will have a distinctly Roman feeling this year, as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is bringing the glory of the Gladiator era to Texas. On November 2, 2025 through January 25, 2026 the MFAH presents the monumental new exhibition “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times.”

    Featuring 160 objects of antiquity, including marble sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, delicate glass vessels, and exquisite bronze artifacts, the exhibition will transport visitors back in time to the Roman Empire during a flowering of art and architecture. The MFAH partnered with the Saint Louis Art Museum to organize the exhibition, which will showcase many pieces that have never been on view in the U.S.

    While Emperor Trajan might not be the most famous — or in some cases, most infamous — of the Roman emperors, he ruled between 98 and 117 C.E. during the empire’s height and was the second of the so-called “Five Good Emperors” of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty. He was also the first emperor born outside of present-day Italy, in what is now Andalusia, Spain. During his reign, he granted citizenship and rights to some peoples from conquered lands. The exhibition will explore how this time period expanded what it meant to be a Roman and how art reflected Rome’s power and promoted the empire’s values and ideals.

    \u200bThe Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
      

    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    From statues of prominent men and women of the era, including Trajan, to vivid frescoes and furnishing from the villas of Pompeii, the objects in the exhibition will tell fascinating cultural and political stories of life in imperial Rome. To add context to the artworks and objects of antiquity, the MFAH will recreate a section of Trajan’s Column, which was a towering pillar with a spiraling narrative frieze, one of the few monumental sculptures to have survived the fall of Rome.

    “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times” brings such a wealth of objects to Houston thanks to unprecedented loans from the renowned antiquities collections of Italian museums including Museo Nazionale Romano, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, the Parco Archeologico di Ostia, and the Musei Vaticani. It would would likely take months of travel across Italy to see this much art.

    “This is truly a rare opportunity for U.S. audiences to experience spectacular objects from this glorious era of the Roman Empire,” said Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, in a statement. “We are enormously grateful to our colleagues in Rome, Naples, and Vatican City for lending these treasures to us and broadening the appreciation of Italy’s cultural heritage.”

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