Shakespeare Dances

I believe that Shakespeare is the greatest fount of inspiration for a choreographer. He is the most humane of all poets. He sees things, speaks of things, that have a dimension far more powerful than his own words. But that does not mean that I wish in any way to detract from his language. Some critic or other said that you cannot understand Shakespeare unless you bring your own humanity along. I think that is the crux. He had such a deep understanding of people, his descriptions of his characters and their relationships were so tremendously complex and forceful that we understand them on the dance stage as well, even without words, as paradoxical as that may sound.
John Neumeier

John Neumeier has created a large number of choreographies based on plays by William Shakespeare. He has revised some of them many times over and shifted their perspectives. For the 40th anniversary of the Hamburg Ballett, Neumeier has extracted material from three originally concert-length Shakespeare choreographies and distilled them into a single evening that will serve as a representative overview of his long years of work with the English dramatist’s plays. Neumeier’s latest version of Hamlet forms the core of the evening, bookended by the two comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In all three abridged versions, Neumeier brings what he regards as the essential aspects more clearly to the fore. One character appears throughout the whole evening to hold it all together: Jaques from As You Like It. Neumeier explains his role: “In Shakespeare, Jaques speaks his monologue as an observer of human nature and its vicissitudes. He is referring to the exposure of human existence when he says ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’. Hovering between amusement and seriousness, energy and the will to live become visible even when life and death are switched. And so it could be said that at the theatre the strength prevails from which every beginning originates.”