RADIO AND JULIET
Edward Clug & Slovene National Theatre Maribur
esplanade theatre
3 june












i want to get this straight: NOT watching a ballet performance live is a CRIME.
the stuff they show on the local Arts Central are poor substitutes to the real thing. and what better way to watch a piece live than to watch one choreographed by the world-renowed Edward Clug?

i wished i had watched Architecture of Silence cos judging by what i saw in Radio and Juliet, it must have been awesome. i'm no dancer but i guess you don't have to be one to appreciate the intricate human stories and emotions delivered through the dancers' movements. i SWEAR i have never seen anything so graceful and aggressive all at the same time. it was freaking shocking but i LOVED it. romeo and juliet was the first Shakespeare play that i studied and my favourite. thus, i was very ready and open-minded about it BUT i didn't expect my brain to be blown away like that. seriously.

so Radio and Juliet is a modern ballet piece that tells the tale of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (duh) but to Radiohead's music. it's such an insane pairing, the traditional to the modern, and surprisingly it works that it's so, er, to put it simply, insane. :D

one of the coolest things about it is that there were black&white film snippets of some scenes from the play. and there was this fight scene (all ballet. and damn those 8-pack dancers are freaking good. and yes, veryvery good to look at too. ahahh.) that was played forwards then backwards. all i could do was look open-mouthed in awe. i've never seen anything like it. and the dancers were incredible. i've never seen the human body twist and bend and turn and leap like that. i thought that maybe that's how our ancestors survived the prehistoric times by being as agile and as nimble as them. us lesser mortals ('us' as in me.) are probably just very pathetic genetic copies.

the most heart-wrenching scene is the one where Andrej Hajdinjak, the lighting designer, played with the lights, telling the part where juliet "dies" in romeo's arms, then it was all dark on stage, then juliet appears holding the dead romeo in her arms (when i saw 'in arms', i do mean in arms. juliet's one strong lady). the stage goes black again before the spotlight is on juliet sitting beside the face-down romeo, holding the dreaded knife/poison. the way she died, it left me very quiet. hell, it left the whole theatre at the esplanade quiet. it was so abrupt and so apt that it took a moment to register. and when it did, there was this huge thundering applause that i thought my arms would break and my ears would bleed.

it was that good.

meeting Edward Clug afterwards during the post-show dialgue was fascinating cos he explained why he used certain music and scenes in that accent of his. and his picture in the show's pamplet doesn't do him justice. a dancer himself, he's got a great built and his eyes are so intense that it redefines the definition of "tall, dark and handsome". shuwen was beside me leaning over the balcony to get a closer look and man, i can tell you that he beats her botak zinadine zidane anytime.


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