For Benjamin Millepied, Architecture Took “Romeo and Juliet Suite” to New Heights
At the Park Avenue Armory, Benjamin Millepied transforms Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” into an immersive work of dance and film, using architecture and a roaming camera to guide audiences through a layered, cinematic performance
“It’s really a film score,” Benjamin Millepied says of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.” It was the Prokofiev arrangement that accompanied the New York City debut of Millepied’s “Romeo and Juliet Suite,” a site-specific dance and film performance that took viewers and dancers alike through the cavernous halls of the Park Avenue Armory earlier this month. “There’s absolutely no way that I would have made a “Romeo and Juliet” without the cinematography element,” he continues. “I would have had no interest.”
It should come as no surprise that Millepied sees the world through a cinematic lens. Choreographing Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and contributing movement direction to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune franchise gave the virtuosic ballet dancer-turned-choreographer and Galerie Creative Mind his pop culture breakout, and in 2023, Millepied made his directorial debut with Carmen, starring Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal. But even when discussing his works with the L.A. Dance Project, the dance company he co-founded in 2013 with Charles Fabius, Millepied joyfully emphasizes the ones with a corresponding dance film.
Less talked-about, however, is the director-choreographer’s passion for architecture. “I love letting the space inspire the dance,” he says. “How do you use it? What atmosphere does it have? What story does it tell? What’s the right sound? How do you create something that touches on the essence of the artwork and the space?”
“Romeo and Juliet Suite,” which premiered on March 3 and ran until March 21 as part of this year’s Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels festival, gave Millepied an opportunity to bring these twin passions to life—albeit in a way that confounded traditional dance critics given how the production’s most dependable narrator was camera operator Sebastien Marcovici.
In a role once assumed by Millepied himself, Marcovici and his camera were the audience’s portal to the production’s most secretive moments: the covert dance scene, in which Romeo and Juliet fall in love, unfolded in a tucked-away ballroom far from where the stage and audience sat in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall; the balcony kiss took place on a catwalk overhead. Even the death of Tybalt is perceptible only on screen in a fateful duel with Romeo that takes place underneath the risers seating the audience.
Where many artists might have looked at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory—a historic venue that occupies an entire city block in Manhattan—as a space of infinite possibilities, Millepied’s vision seems to have flourished within its constraints. “I really thrive when I have to work with restrictions. Yes, the Armory is huge, but you have something really specific to express,” he says. “Being creative with solutions really excites me. When you make a ballet, you just have your studio and your dancers, and you’re free. When you start to work with space and time and people and cameras… I really loved it.”