Preview: Juliano Nunes Takes Romeo And Juliet Up A Notch

Philadelphia Ballet's Resident Choreographer Creates New Version of Classic Story

The iconic Romeo and Juliet balcony pas de deux is underway in a Philadelphia Ballet studio when I arrive. The dancers move from first recognition to an irreversible declaration of love. Thays Golz and Zecheng Liang are already inside it. Juliet reaches. Romeo answers. The phrase is in motion.

Around them, leading dancers, choreographers, and coaches fill the room. Prokofiev’s score fills the space. Strings burn with urgency. Violins tremble at the edge of breath while lower voices gather weight beneath them.

Few moments in ballet feel as charged or as closely held as the balcony pas de deux in Romeo and Juliet. Set to Prokofiev’s surging score, it unfolds with a kind of gravity where movement and music lock together in breath and precision, each phrase carrying a sense of exposure and inevitability.

I sit downstage, close enough to register the smallest exchanges. Weight passes between hands. Breath moves between partners. Lifts and recoveries land with exact timing.

Juliano Nunes, the company’s Resident Choreographer, shapes the rehearsal in real time. Rehearsal director Charles Askegard stands to the side. At the piano, Ian Howells drives the score forward with precision from the first phrase.

At the invitation of Artistic Director Angel Corella, Nunes creates a new Romeo and Juliet, a ballet staged countless times. He initially questions whether another version is necessary. Works like this endure because each generation reinterprets them. In the studio, the answer becomes clear.

We do need another Romeo and Juliet. Now it is Juliano Nunes’ turn.

The balcony pas de deux, Romeo and Juliet’s first private encounter, defines the ballet. They meet in secret and declare love across separation. The choreography demands youthful abandon. Movement gives way to instinct, desire, and immediacy. Trust registers instantly in the body. Everything depends on precision.

In front of me, some of the finest dancers in the world work through one of the ballet’s most rapturous passages, where every reach, lift, and yielding step becomes both intimate and exact under that weight of Prokofiev’s music.

Cast in rotating pairings, Yuka Iseda dances with Arian Molina Soca, Jack Thomas with So Jung Shin, and Thays Golz with Zecheng Liang. They move into the score as it shifts and opens. They come from Japan, Cuba, the United States, South Korea, Brazil, and China, converging in a single studio.

The room holds quiet focus. Everyone understands what the scene requires: total presence, responsiveness, and aliveness. The music surges with urgency and release.

Nunes works in close detail. He stops a lift mid phrase, adjusts a wrist, resets a transition between partners. Then he steps into the choreography himself. He runs Juliet’s pathway, places weight, traces the turn, tests the leap. He confirms the movement physically before returning it to the dancers. He does not describe the work from the outside. He enters it. He becomes Romeo and Juliet from within.

With Golz, he refines an embrace toward her Romeo, then takes the pathway himself. The movement shifts. The torso opens. The weight clarifies. The step grounds. Together they build it in real time.

I watch Nunes working with Golz and Liang, a few feet away, isolating a fractional shift that leads into a leap and turn. He adjusts the entry and timing. When it resolves, the phrase opens fully into the music with clarity and alignment.

When discussing his creative process, Nunes speaks of a “third eye,” a way of registering connection between partners and movement. In practice, it is awareness beyond execution. It is alertness to timing, weight, and shared intention in real time.

He also speaks about play.

Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Nunes sits in a mango tree eating fruit, a kind of thinking before thought. It is instinctive and unburdened by pressure or form.

That openness is what he brings into the studio. His process remains immediate, curious, and alive.

What he calls the “emotional bridge” – Prokofiev’s notes – runs through the dancers. It marks the point where imagination becomes physical action. It appears as movement shifts, softens, or sharpens before it fully forms.

Ultimately, Romeo and Juliet endures because it reduces everything to something immediate and absolute.

Love arrives without hesitation. It cannot be delayed or undone.

In the studio, that idea becomes physical through Prokofiev’s propulsive, sweeping score and choreography that demands speed, clarity, and risk in every exchange. Nunes and the dancers return to the urgency of the story.

What emerges in the studio suggests a Romeo and Juliet that could stand among the strongest versions of the ballet. Every detail is being pushed toward clarity, urgency, and emotional risk rather than ornament.