Though I’ve heard ballet dancers say there are moments onstage when they feel more like actors than athletes, I’ve always assumed the choices available to dancers as actors were few, and that embodying a character was secondary to embodying the most perfect lines of one’s body. Under ballet’s demands of technical precision, I thought character could only emerge within a confined menu of available steps and techniques, like a plant growing in a controlled lab. But when the dancer Aran Bell, in his role as Romeo, found Juliet’s lifeless body in the crypt, I finally understood.
I was high up in my own balcony, in the cheap seats, but could see each muscle of his face tremble. He crumpled over his lover’s body, heaving with a depth of grief that let his dancing access his character’s centuries-old pain. And when Christine Shevchenko, as the heroine Tatyana, emerged onstage in the final act of with her aristocratic husband.
The lines of her lithe body were made even straighter now by pride and class ascension. Shevchenko spun victoriously through her St. Petersburg palace as if squashing her past provincial self like a bug beneath her toe box.
And when Daniel Camargo and SunMi Park, as the long-repressed lovers in , embraced after being forced apart for over twenty years. The lifts that Camargo held Park through weren’t the gentle and effortless arabesque lifts of polite characters; they were the hungry thrashings of desperate ones. Throughout June and July, I watc.