Dancers in Miami City Ballet's Romeo and Juliet Prepare for Roles of Star-Crossed Lovers

With their cloud-nine highs and rock-bottom lows, who or what can rein in the passions of teenagers in love? The question that puts the fizz in pop songs and the shudders in drama reverberates throughout John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet, a full-evening ballet with a Sergei Prokofiev score. Beginning its run at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center on Friday, October 21, Miami City Ballet will stage this take on Shakespeare’s tragedy about Verona’s star-crossed lovers with dance steps turned into poetry.

In addition to showing how a famed romantic story translates into a storied ballet, the season opener from MCB brings a noteworthy casting choice: two corps de ballet dancers, hired just this year, debuting with their new company in the title roles. Isadora Valero, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, and Brooks Landegger, a 20-year-old New York City native, have arrived at this auspicious — and out of the ordinary — career juncture through different paths, but they share a steady, straight-ahead artistic focus.

“A great opportunity means a great responsibility,” says Valero, appreciative of the support MCB artistic director Lourdes Lopez has lent to their endeavor. “I’ve got to give this 200 percent. Brooks and I have been discovering our parts together, and that’s a beautiful thing.”

(Principals Katia Carranza and Renan Cerderio, with long-established Romeo and Juliet credits, and another pair of corps members, Cameron Catazaro and Nina Fernandes, will alternate as the leads in the production.)

After weeks of rehearsals, the dancers are putting the final and demandingly fine touches on their interpretations under the watchful eye of former Romeo and now-artistic director of Czech National Ballet, Warsaw-born Filip Barankiewicz. As the répétiteur, it’s his mission to preserve the choreographer’s vision from the 1962 work for Germany’s Stuttgart Ballet, where South-African-born dancer and choreographer Cranko was director until his untimely death in a 1973 plane crash. Both Valero and Landegger credit Barankiewicz’s curatorial skills, bolstered by MCB’s ballet masters, as the basis of an artistically transformative experience.
“I just find Cranko’s dramaturgy so amazing,” says the ballerina. “It gives his choreography such a natural feel, letting flesh-and-blood individuals shine through. And it tells me to always ask of my character, ‘What will you do now, and why?’" For her, this becomes a search for mental and situational stimuli, fuel, and framework for the dance moves.

Landegger remains thankful for a deep dive he took into Shakespeare’s play in middle school under the guidance of a favorite English teacher. And, for a through-line in the ballet, he relies on the notion that “the music is the dance,” part of a foundation built upon the guidance of Peter Stark (whose own mentor was Cuban-American ballet star Fernando Bujones) and School of American Ballet’s Jock Soto.

But Landegger emphasizes that in a ballet with so much bustle — including the ballroom scene in the first act and the hubbub of the marketplace in the second — the most valuable lesson he’s drawn from recent coaching has been “to find the power of stillness.” Sure, the big moments are there for him to charge through, whether cavorting with his Montague cohorts, challenging his Capulet antagonist Tybalt, or raising Juliet heavenward in her swoons. But, as Landegger has learned, double aerial turns and effusive lifts must leave room for quiet moments illuminated by the contained power of love.

To bring this popular ballet a personal voice also requires, according to Valero, “digging through the work’s layers.” Luckily for her, this has involved incisive conversations with her mother, a specialist in adolescent psychology, about the teenage brain.
“Decision making is so different for teens — more intuitive, intense,” Valero points out. "This is related to hormones, of course — to discovering sexuality, with the personality still in development. It can be wonderful but also over-the-top. You see that in the ballet from the start. As things get heavy, Juliet feels she can plunge through them. So tragedy develops. But this is a crescendo. There’s also incredible joy here. As an actress, a ballerina, I must play this one step at a time, as if with no knowledge of the ending, making sure the audience feels what Juliet does at every moment.” And in Romeo and Juliet, dopamine surges and perilous choices based on the amygdala’s emotional hiccups have found such splendid portraiture.

Valero further connects this choreography to her training and early career at Hamburg Ballet, directed by John Neumeier, once a Cranko protégé and himself a creator of notable narrative ballets. At her former company, Valero even got to perform in Cranko’s Onegin, inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s verses in another thwarted-love story.

For his part, Landegger is no stranger to the stagecraft of storytelling, having toured in the lead of the musical Billy Elliot for more than a year in his early teens. “That’s a story with great happiness but also great sadness,” he says, linking this to his current role. “And it’s all about the journey.”

Landegger’s experience in musical theater strengthens his bond with Andrei Chagas, a fellow corps member and live-wire friend Mercutio to his Romeo. Chagas, who danced different roles the previous two MCB productions of the ballet, now brings a fresh perspective as he returns to the company after a period in which he danced on Broadway and performed as a shark in Steven Spielberg’s film version of West Side Story.
“I am a different artist today,” says Chagas. “I’ve learned to make sure I know a character’s story inside out.”

Not diminishing the physical challenge of staying aloft in Mercutio’s whirlwind — including some tricky sword fighting — Chagas emphasizes, “You really have to hold the narrative, which calls for a lot of emotional stamina. There’s a showy, funny aspect to Mercutio, but he’s not a clown. He sees his friend struggling in love and wants to clear the way by challenging Tybalt’s hostility through teasing. He can’t foresee his own death.” There’s that teen brashness again, and as Valero also indicates, the step-by-step, multi-threaded weaving of the tragedy.

“This is all about a thoughtful partnership,” underscores Chagas, who, through his musical-theater stint, gained a deeper respect for how all those involved in complicated productions like Romeo and Juliet cultivate their craft. He says, “Every time I step into the studio, I try to figure out ways to better help not just me but the whole collective. Whoever we are, whatever we do, we’re better by working at this together.”

– Guillermo Perez, ArtburstMiami.com

Miami City Ballet's Romeo and Juliet. 7:30 p.m. Friday, October 21, and Saturday, October 22, and 2 p.m. Sunday, October 23, at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 5, and 2 p.m. Sunday, November 6, Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale. 7:30 p.m. Friday, November 11, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 12, and 1 p.m. Sunday, November 13, Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach; 305-929-7010; miamicityballet.org. Tickets cost $39 to $199.