Star-Cross’d Lovers in the Age of AIDS: Rudolf Nureyev’s Romeo and Juliet as Intersemiotic Translation

• Autor(a) principal: Bennett, Karen
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/5346
• topic: Romeo and Juliet; Nureyev, Rudolf, 1938-1993; Ballet; Intersemiotic translation; Intermediality; Prokofief, Sergei, 1891-1953

Rudolph Nureyev’s Romeo and Juliet, first staged in 1977 and filmed in 1995, is a work of intermediality par excellence. Like all ballet productions, its ‘meaning(s)’ emerge(s) from the interaction of multiple semiotic codes (kinesthetic, visual and audio), mediated further by the process of filming that resulted in the Warner Music Video upon which this study centres. Moreoever, it is also an interesting example of intersemiotic translation, based as it is upon both a verbal and a musical text, Shakespeare’s play and Prokofiev’s musical score respectively. This paper examines Nureyev’s version of the tale of the ‘star cross’d lovers’ as a comment upon the era in which he himself lived, the aftermath of the youth revolution when the exuberance and optimism of the sixties was beginning to wear a little thin. In the light of this, his use of gay iconography, images of pestilence and invocations of doom take on a new sinister significance.