Prokofiev, Romeo y Julieta en ADDA Alicante

ADDA·SIMFÒNICA ALICANTE

JOSEP VICENT, director titular

ASUN NOALES, dirección escénica y coreografía

Rosanna Freda, asistente de coreografía

Joaquín Hernández, Diseño Iluminación

Luis Crespo, Diseño espacio escénico

Ana Estéban, Vestuario

Federica Fasano, Investigación

Germán Antón, Fotografía

Bailarines: Deivid Barrera, Rosanna Freda, Diana Grytsailo, Iván Merino, Alice Pieri,
Laura Martín, Joel Mesa Gutiérrez, Salvador Rocher, Theo Vanpop, Jennifer Wallen,
Samuel Olariaga, Araitz Lasa

What can surprise in a performance of music that is almost known by heart, providing a scenario for a ballet whose story one has heard and seen performed countless times? The answer is just about everything. A story is as old as its current telling, if the tellers have told it their way. This was very much the case last night in Alicante when the ADDA Orchestra under Josep Vicent played Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet to the choreography of Asun Noales.

One always needs to be reminded of the power of human imagination, and this performance will live log in the memory. Here there were no sumptuous costumes, no monumental sets. Staging was accomplished with a few cubes that could serve as seats, walls or plinths, and a pair of steel scaffolds that had vegetation on one side. These could be rotated to present a garden, a balcony or a tomb. Costumes were minimal, with the feuding Montagues and Capulets needing no obvious uniforms to identify their allegiance.

But what was on display was raw emotion, vividly portrayed by a quite excellent choreography. There was not a single gesture in the audience’s view merely for the sake of the gesture. Nothing was purely technical. Everything meant something.

The audience was left in no doubt about the sexual nature of Romeo and Juliet’s mutual attraction. And the fight scenes were utterly convincing, despite the fact that no weapons were ever visible.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the whole evening was the portrayal of Father Lawrence. Prokofiev’s sensuous music was the raw material, but the choreography depicted a character that was sinister, clearly devout and all too willing to help, but also someone who wished to envelop and control. It was a depiction close to witchcraft, but probably got closer to a medieval mind’s interpretation of religion, with its capacity to deliver eternal damnation and suffering than any other I have seen.

Rosanna Freda and Salvador Rocher in the principal roles were hardly off stage, but other performances were also superb, not least the Mercutio, the Tibalt and the Nurse. And everything was delivered by a dozen dancers.

This was a minimalist production with wholly modern choreography, but the humanity that was depicted was direct, very moving, and communicated so vividly that it rendered considerations of “style” simply irrelevant.