Renegade Theatre's version of Romeo and Juliet, which is set to wow audiences at the Dublin Fringe Festival, does away with words for the most part and makes spectacular use of the expressiveness of hip-hop dance to get across its message, writes Brian Boyd
When the Renegade Theatre company arrived at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, they had little or no advance publicity and they were touting a show that sounded like a hackneyed Fringe stunt - that lazy juxtaposition of high and low art. Their Rumble production was going to be something along the lines of "a hip-hop version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet". It's something you'd normally file alongside the Japanese Noh theatre version of Abigail's Party or any revue style show featuring a bunch of medical students (Beyond All Reasonable Gout, etc) as a facile box office, prodding exercise. The venue where Renegade pitched their tent for the month of August was nervous about the show: there had been no pre-sell and no press cuttings to wave in people's faces. On the opening night of Rumble, the Fringe folk looked on anxiously as the first audience traipsed out of the venue. There was no chatter about the show, just silence. Very worrying.
It transpired that the silence was because almost each and every audience member was texting friends to "Go and see Rumble show, it is brill". The following day the entire run was sold out and the Fringe had just brought another memorable theatrical experience to UK audiences. Rumble went on to win a Herald Angel, a Best Physical Show award and a Fringe First at the festival. "Awesome" and "breathtaking", swooned the critics.
On a sunny afternoon last week in a small town somewhere near the Dutch/German border, the Renegade company presented Rumble as one of the highlights of the Noorderzon Theatre Festival. Under a big circus tent, the nine-strong cast have been divided up into the Montague and Capulet families as this hip-hop drama prepares to recast Shakespeare's tale of a family feud as a street battle. Verona circa 1595 it's clearly not.
All the dancers have on stage is some rolling scaffolding, but soon the graffiti, scratching, breaking and spinning take over. Over the next hour and a half you are forcefully disabused of any notion that dance theatre is a niche activity only appreciated by a weird minority. Here it's all thrills and spills and thrillingly revelatory.
This is Shakespeare after he has been dragged down a back alley and given a headbutting. The two scaffolds quickly become urban tower blocks from where the rival street gangs "diss" each other out. The rumble of the title (a nod to how Rodgers and Hammerstein replayed the romantic tragedy in West Side Story) is placed here over a musical backdrop of hip-hop rhymes, weirded-out jazz and some pulsating dub reggae. This so solid crew of modern dancers are virtuoso breakdancers. They body-pop, execute handless somersaults and throw in some snazzy gyroscope twists in an exhilarating display of athleticism. The well-known story of two star-crossed lovers is reduced to essentials, and what little narrative there is is through the hip-hop medium with occasional snatches of speech in both German and English. You don't need words when you have this form of expressive movement. It's difficult to describe the highlights of such a physical piece - there's one moment when you think the dancers are facing the audience but they're actually facing the back of the stage (it's remarkably clever how they pull this inside-out trick off). The highlight of highlights, though, has to be during the face-off between Mercutio and Tybalt, when the dancers do their individual party pieces - you will never see head-spinning like this. It's so good, it gets a standing ovation.
And there is even more to Rumble than this awesome array of physical movements. When Peter Ustinov offered his own take of Romeo and Juliet on Broadway in the 1950s he called it Romanoff and Juliet, and the warring sides in his production were not the Capulets and Montagues but the Communists and Capitalists. Similarly, West Side Story reworked the Verona family feud as one of racial tension, where the all-white Jets gang are deeply suspicious of the newly-arrived immigrant Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks. Renegade's take on the Elizabethan drama is not explicitly about the tensions between immigrant and so-called "native" communities but it exists here as an undertow. One of the show's directors and choreographers, Lorca Renoux, is a former B-boy from the urban ghettos of Paris.
"I used to be a sprayer (a graffiti artist) and there were always very strong links between the sprayers and the hip-hop scene," he says. "It's interesting if you look at France and Germany in particular, the hip-hop scene was a big feature of immigrant communities. It was all about listening to people like Public Enemy and Rakim and the spraying would have a political edge - stuff about apartheid or how people were being treated by the police. It was always a big thing for me how hip-hop was a very forceful engagement in the way it is delivered. So that idea of bringing this powerful form of street culture to what is known as 'high art' - even though I don't regard Shakespeare as high art - really interested me.
"It's funny now to look back on the spraying scene, because these days it's more of a big media machine than an underground political event - you see that street graffiti is used in advertisements and now the sprayers are using Photoshop and everything."
After training as a modern dancer in France, Renoux hooked up with a former street busker, Markus Michalowski from Germany. Michalowski trained in dance, mime and drama and went on to make a name for himself as a fight director for films. Together with producer Zekai Fenerci, who used to be known as the godfather of the hip-hop scene in the Ruhr Valley, the three assembled Germany's finest street-dancers for an assault on Romeo and Juliet.
"If you look at the cast of Rumble, you'll see some Turkish people who have been brought up in Germany, and this is an attempt to get across that idea of street life in certain parts of Germany, where you have immigrant communities living side-by-side with 'native' communities," says Renoux.
"Expressing this story through hip-hop, through street culture, brings such an immediacy to the work and such an energy. The whole idea of the 'battle' is huge in hip-hop, this idea of name-calling, of duelling and it's putting this rap-style aggression into this particular story, which is the interesting part." The word "interesting" doesn't do justice to the rendition in Rumble of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, delivered entirely through the body, or to what a gravity-defying Juliet gets up to during her balcony duet with Romeo; and certainly not to what Balthasar can achieve using only his head as balance. Shakespeare - you've just been punked.
Renegade's Rumble is at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Great Denmark Street from September 12th-24th at 8pm, with matinees on the 17th and 24th at 2pm, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival (September 12th-October 2nd). See next week's Ticket for full Fringe listings. For bookings, call 1850-374643. Further information at www.fringefest.com
