Celebrated choreographer, director, and filmmaker Benjamin Millepied has crafted an impressive body of artistic projects, starting out as a dancer with New York City Ballet and moving on to create work for his company L.A. Dance Project and other prestigious companies from around the world, as well as Darren Aronofsky’s acclaimed film Black Swan. He harnesses his propulsive style, a fusion of ballet and contemporary movement, to revisit Prokofiev’s iconic ballet in a contemporary, site-specific take blending dance, theater, and film. This inventive production far exceeds the parameters of a traditional stage setting with live video from handheld cameras transmitted to onstage screens that follows the dancers both backstage and throughout the Armory. The dance-drama plays with the ideas of theatricality and reality and features a condensed version of Shakespeare’s story that distills the narrative to its essentials, focusing on the undying love of the central couple and the explosive emotions elicited. Each performance features a different cast as the star-crossed lovers, departing from traditional gender norms to highlight diverse couples—male/ female, male/male, female/female—in a universal celebration of love. Millepied thus presents the mythical tale through a modern and original lens, rediscovering its beauty in a fresh and inspired interpretation of the tragic tale.
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Ages: 13 +
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About Park Avenue Armory
Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory fills a critical void in the cultural ecology of New York, supporting unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.