SONDERimmersive’s retelling of Romeo and Juliet — Through Yonder Window — opens tonight inside the Gateway mall’s parking garage downtown. For $45, a car full of people (who are hopefully quarantining together) can view the hour-long installation without getting out of their vehicle. I attended a preview last night with Alex Barbier. The following is a conversation about what we saw. We took the photos as well.
-Samuel Hanson, editor
Sam: It was refreshing to get out of the house and see some work — odd to say refreshing about an hour spent in a windowless concrete garage. I found the process of guiding the car into place nerve-wracking, for some reason I was afraid I would run over a performer.
Alex: Directing the cars how and where to park might have been the most complex choreography, though there was much that I didn’t see (the introductory voice-over warned us that it would be impossible to see every scene and encouraged us to focus on what was directly in front of us). I’ve been thinking a lot lately about audience expectations regarding dance performances. I’m tempted to tell people not to have expectations, but not having expectations is hard when you attend something as well-known as Romeo and Juliet.
Rick Curtiss as Lord Montague
Sam: I have been hearing lots of discussions about how coronavirus compares to the AIDS epidemic or the plague and I think that set up this expectation for me that the show would deal with the real tragedy of the situation — but it was actually quite lighthearted.
Alex: I imagine that, during the rehearsal process, there was so much to discover that didn’t have to do with the content… how to stay six feet away from each other, how to stay masked during costume changes, how to pass props without making contact, how to get close to the audience without breathing on them, how to direct the cars to park…
Sam: I thought a lot about that too. The performance reflected some of the irrational compromises all of us are making with ourselves and each other right now. The moment when — I think it was Romeo — stuck a sword through my open window freaked me out. I put on a mask. But in general it did seem that a lot of thought had gone into remaining socially distant.
Alex: I thought the performers interacting with the cars was fun. They made a lot of eye contact through the windows, rolled around on the hood, wrote “Just Married” on our back windshield, and then washed the car (or at least the parts they touched) at the end.
Nadia Sine as Juliet
Sam: I kind of wish they’d left the paint. Leaving it would have been a riskier choice. Another image that I enjoyed but that also made me nervous: Romeo and Juliet chasing each other around our car, blowing up white balloons, and throwing them back and forth. I liked the idea of their breath made visible — their kisses but also their contagion. Another part of me really wondered if it was safe. I don’t say that to call them out. I think that artists have to try things in reaction to situation — and this is the situation we’re all living in. But that split within my own mind — between reading the image as an image and reading it as a possible, physical transmission of spit and the ensuing chemistry — to me that was the memorable moment of the evening.
Alex: I remember working hard to piece together the cast. Tybalt and Mercutio became clear to me after their wardrobe changes. Two of the men — I think Romeo and Lord Montague — had very similar builds and wore similar shirts. For some reason, maybe because this is a more experimental work, I wondered if the costumes were different every day and if they’d worn similar shirts today accidentally. But they were wearing Hawaiian shirts that remind me of the one Leonardo DiCaprio wears in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and I couldn’t stop wondering if that was done on purpose. Leo in that unbuttoned shirt with his chest sweaty and bandaged is what you remember about his character, you know?
Emma Sargent and Hannah Fischer — Tybalt and Mercutio as ghosts
Sam: Oddly, what I remember about the movie is the fish tank in the scene where the lover’s meet at a party. I recall very little else. Maybe the most wonderful thing about Shakespeare is that he himself is so endemic. You can’t escape his work, and if you seek it out there’s lots to find. My favorite of his plays is The Tempest and I must have seen it dozens of times. On film, my favorite version is Derek Jarman’s which ends with Elisabeth Welch singing “Stormy Weather”. My favorite staged version was an English company, Donmar, that toured to NYC and did a staged version set as a play within a play inside a contemporary women’s prison. But all of them add up to something more and they accumulate in your mind as you grow older.
I know Romeo and Juliet is your favorite of Shakespeare’s works. How do you think this will sift and accumulate in your larger experience of the play as time passes?
Alex: Oooh, the fish tank. Yeah that’s the best scene of Baz’s version. I will remember the experience of watching a performance inside of a parked car in a garage more than I’ll remember the content, I think. And that’s not intended to be a jab. But I do think that the aspects of Romeo and Juliet that make it memorable were missing (the longing, the intimacy, the hatred between the households… none of these were as palpable as in other versions but again maybe I missed them due to my parking spot). It didn’t feel like the story of Romeo and Juliet and their fair Verona was the point of this performance. The point, it seemed, was to act quickly on a project that reflects the current time (I’m making an assumption here, because I know that SONDER was in the midst of producing a completely different show until quarantine began). I would say it accomplished that, not only through the use of the masks and the social distancing, but also in the voiceovers that helped clarify the action. The script was reworked to reference hand-sanitizing, spreading disease, and other fears and tactics that have become commonplace since COVID-19 arrived.
Sam: I don’t think the pandemic is ending anytime soon. This obviously isn’t the news we want but it’s the truth. Limitations can lead artists to new forms of creativity. I’ll be interested to see how people continue to solve this problem and keep making dances.
Alexandra Barbier is a performance maker who has taught courses in creative process, dance in culture, and queer performance art. She has performed with Anna Azrieli and Daniel Clifton, received funding from the Bastian Foundation to produce an evening-length performance, and received the endowed assistantship with the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Program. abarbier.com.
Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore.