DIE ANOTHER DAY

DANCE

22 June

Recently landed: Die Another Day

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet, especially for Fjord Review.

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In defiance of the stars overhead, and destiny foretold, Joseph Caley’s Romeo falls, and utterly so, for Grace Carroll’s Juliet, on the opening night of The Australian Ballet’s Melbourne season of John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet. Though I know the outcome of the star-cross’d lovers, still, or rather, because of my attachment to the universal tale, I arrive willing to be swept off my feet, like Juliet herself, such is the lure of the Shakespearean tragedy.

Whether you identify with the lovers unwavering resolve, committing suicide in each other’s embrace, or their struggle for freedom, or, widening the frame, the tragedy of social justice or poetic justice, Romeo and Juliet will outlive us all.[i] And in Cranko’s hands, staged by Yseult Lendvai and Mark Kay, what a glorious ‘outliving’ it shall prove, as Stephen Baynes’s Friar Laurence, memento mori in hand, communes with a skull, before offering forth, what transpires, a perilous stratagem. Questions of mortality and duality abound in all good tellings of this beloved tale, and Cranko’s version offers this in spades. There must be symbols of duration and decay, as the characters gallop to their known catastrophic ending. Death is a small price to pay for such a love.

Cranko’s choreography conveys the urgency of the story in the steps that repeat as Sergei Prokofiev’s ground-breaking, then, heartbreaking, still, score also repeats, though, as you can never step on the same crack twice, in every repeat, a new layer is woven. From Juliet’s initial youthful steps, to budding love, rapture, and finally, totality within the dark folds of the family crypt, the progression is such that each dancer in the role can, like Juliet herself does, take matters into their own hands. As Carroll’s Juliet looks for the first and last time at the sunrise, the future appears momentarily open and undecided[ii]. As she asserts her freedom, soloist Carroll ingrains her Juliet’s self-determination with a knowing that belies both her and her character’s years. Together with Caley, their youthful refusal to regard mortality draws me in.

[i] Paul A. Kottman, ‘Defying the Stars: Tragic Love as the Struggle for Freedom in Romeo and Juliet’ Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41350167, accessed 7th June, 2026.