Match & Watch: Romeo & Juliet - Up Close

We invite you to find your new dance partner through Match & Watch. Because we believe that watching dance is a great experience, but even more beautiful when you can share it with someone. A few days before the performance, you will receive a questionnaire from us, fill it in and, based on it, we will match you with the person we believe to be your ideal dance partner. Your dance partner does not necessarily have to be romantic; it can also be a meeting of people with a shared passion.

-|-On the evening of the performance, you will be welcomed at 19:15 in the Bookshop of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Here you will meet your match and get a drink from us. Afterwards, you will enjoy the performance Romeo & Juliet - Up Close together.
After the performance, there will be a DJ to get your own feet off the floor.

The “Match & Watch” concept is based on “Dating the Unknown” by Theater Rotterdam

Romeo & Juliet - Up Close presents Shakespeare's famous tragedy in an utterly unique way, with different stories and perspectives running in parallel. Love here is a many-headed monster that makes passion, desperation and intensity fight for precedence. The production, originally created with the dancers of the Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich, earned the choreographers Erna Ómarsdóttir and Halla Ólafsdóttir a nomination for the prestigious German Faust Award.

In Iceland Dance Company's performance, too, we do not see classical ballet steps or aesthetic romanticism, but a raw, instinctive dance and visual language that exposes the layers and emotions of the story. Here, Shakespeare's famous tragedy is an intense battle between passion and destruction. The dancers throw themselves into each other's arms, cling to each other in despair or are cruelly separated from each other. Bodies collide, fall, bleed. Hugs are steeped in longing and despair, the confrontations feel like real fights.

-|-The stage is as ruthless as the fate that haunts the lovers. The dance floor transforms from a safe cocoon into a battlefield, where blood spatter and traces of sweat emphasize the physical suffering of the characters. Sometimes the choreography moves synchronously with the dramatic sounds of Prokofiev's music, but more often it pinches. The rhythm accelerates to an inevitable end, drenched in blood and tragedy – there is no escaping it.

In their work, Ómarsdóttir and Ólafsdóttir rigorously break with traditional gender roles. They show powerful, authentic bodies that express themselves in the purest form of expression. Romeo & Juliet - Up Close debunks the limiting notions of romance, with an unrelenting perspective on how we see and experience love.

artistic directors and choreographers Erna Ómarsdóttir, Halla Ólafsdóttir
music
Sergei Prokofiev, Skúli Sverrisson (Watching Water)
prokofjev Romeo and Julia performed by Londens Symfonie Orkest
conducted by André Previn
set Chrisander Brun
video Valdimar Jóhannsson in samenwerking met Erna Ómarsdóttir & Halla Ólafsdóttir

-|- costumes Karen Briem, Sunneva Ása Weishappel
lighting Pálmi Jónsson
dancers Andrean Sigurgeirsson, Bjartey Elín Hauksdóttir, Elín Signý Weywadt Ragnarsdóttir, Emilía Benedikta Gísladóttir, Inga Maren Rúnarsdóttir, Luca Pinho Seixas, Saga Sigurðardóttir, Shota Inoue, Una Björg Bjarnadóttir, Védís Kjartansdóttir

The “Match & Watch” concept is based on “Dating the Unknown” by Theater Rotterdam