Coming down the stairs in MacMillan's "Romeo and Juliet": from plain "Daisy Duckness" all the way to perfection...

Some months ago, my dear friend Carol Sumner and I had a big laugh, when talking about the many different ways dancers could come down the stairs in the balcony scene from MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet”.

During our talk, I had to mention Alessandra Ferri - a dancer I could like very much but also dislike intensely because of her incapacity sometimes of trespassing her “ballerina mannerisms” and move into the character/person/human being she is/was portraying (or trying to) - like this coming down the stairs like “Daisy Duck” (as described by a friend of mine who has nothing to do with ballet). Carol pointed out HOW Mr B. would cast everyone perfectly because he could put himself in the audience’s place - some may just call it “empathy” - to avoid embarrassing moments like these. Yes, a member of the audience will not care much about how turned out the dancer is or not - because all that he’ll see is “Daisy Duck”.

This is a fact.

Although I never “compare” dancers, here three different ways of coming down those “goddamned” stairs…

Alessandra Ferri (partnered by Wayne Eagling), the “embodiment of Daisy Duckness”, a great improvement by Margot Fonteyn partnered by Nureyev (who you may think as the “original MacMillan’s Juliet”, which she was not - let’s not forget that this choreography was written for Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, who could NOT dance the première due to “marketing reasons”) and, at the very end Gelsey Kirkland as Juliet to Anthony Dowell’s Romeo, giving this “short passage” her real touch of perfection - like everything else she did…

Enjoy!