ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on five ballet and modern dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s late romances The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. In these plays, Shakespeare includes staged dances, and connects dancing with joy and love. However, he also uses dance imagery to convey darker themes, such as jealousy and vengeance. The choreographers who adapt the late romances – including Rudolf Nureyev, Alexei Ratmansky, and Christopher Wheeldon – explore these tensions between light and dark, and between harmony and discord. They delve into the dark sides of Shakespeare’s male protagonists, Prospero and Leontes, and provide complex endings for their dance works. However, they also portray the joyful unions of young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand, and Perdita and Florizel, to balance out the more negative aspects of the narratives. The chapter analyzes how each production negotiates the tensions between choreography and textuality when Shakespeare is translated into movement, arguing that all five move beyond the confines of Shakespeare’s narratives to explore pure dance.
