'Hamlet' Without Words? Choreographer/Dancer Guillaume Côté on his New Ballet

"I'm actually in Kelowna, BC, right now," renowned choreographer Guillaume Côté – who is also the Principal Dancer with The National Ballet of Canada – says. "I'm creating a new work for their company, Kelowna Ballet."

That's just the latest project on the busy artist's slate. Côté, together with stage director Robert Lepage (a veteran director with the Metropolitan Opera and Cirque du Soleil), is set to visit the Boston stage with a new ballet based on Shakespeare's "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," the timeless story of a young Danish nobleman who, faced with the murder of his father, the king, and the usurpation of his country, wrestles with the question of what to do about it. Dating from around 1600, the play has echoed through literature and art for centuries, from movie adaptations by Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh to influences on foreign films like Chinese director Feng Xiaogang's "Legend of the Black Scorpion" (2006) and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's 1982 film "Fanny and Alexander," not to mention providing plot elements for the Disney animated classic "The Lion King" (1994).

Côté's task, as choreographer for the ballet, is to use only occasional surtitles and the art of dance to communicate the play's story and dialogue. Ex Machina – the company that produced the new work – explains the ballet's ambitions and the angle from which Côté and Lepage approached the work, creating an experience "where phantoms and humans mingle on a minimalist set where light, shadow and transparency play a central role" and the dance "draws a fine line connecting movements of the body with what may or may not be lurking within the corners of the mind."

Already commanding favorable reviews from its runs in Toronto and Chicago, and having completed productions in Alma, California and Montreal, Canada, the work now lands in Boston at the Cutler Majestic Theatre (Feb. 28 – March 1), promising to tell a venerable story in a fresh new way and to blend both contemporary and traditional dance elements, as Côté tells EDGE in an illuminating interview. Read on to discover more about the new work, Côté's process, and what it means to tell a narratively complex, emotionally rich story through movement and music.

EDGE: How do you tell the story of "Hamlet" through dance? And does it make it easier that people probably already have a general idea of the story coming in?

Guillaume Côté: Anyone from the theater would be able to tell you that it's a play not only known for its beautiful soliloquies and moments of poetry, but also has a lot of action. There's a lot going on, so it lends itself pretty well to dance.

It does have this obviously rich storyline that everyone is familiar with – I'm not talking about the scholars and people who are familiar with literature, but the general public who are familiar with the storyline of "The Lion King" or something like that. What I found interesting, too, is when you take away all the words, you're left with a visceral kind of representation of this narrative. We had some beautiful discoveries within the process where a lot was told through the simplicity of the situations that we put the characters in.

I'm from the classical world of dance, so I'm familiar with dance telling stories. In older generations, mime has been used to drive narrative forward, and then the dancing sections [would take place]. But in recent years, there's been different choreographers [who] use the movement of classical ballet, and they turn that into a storytelling device.

I became fascinated with this idea of breaking down the simplicity of how to tell a story with dancing – not with mime, and not with situations or props, but to tell the story through 100% the expression of the body. The great thing about working with a stage director is clarity: [Lepage] is very clear about what comes across, and what doesn't.

EDGE: As a choreographer, do you find that you are structuring the story through movement to play to that familiarity the audience might have to the material, or rather to challenge that familiarity?

Guillaume Côté: We decided to go through the play as is. We didn't try to cater to the audience's familiarity; we told every scene without the words. If you're familiar with the play, you probably will be able to fill in some of the blanks a little bit better. But at the same time... I'm from a small town in northern Quebec, and, I'm sorry, but in Quebec, Shakespeare is not that big. He's not taught in school as much; it's much more French culture. So, when we presented it there, I had a lot of people come to the premiere who are from my family, who don't know anything about Shakespeare, and they all got it.

EDGE: I saw the Powell and Pressburger film "The Red Shoes" for the first time recently, and I was struck at how cinematic the ballet was. It would have been impossible to put on a stage. Have movies influenced how ballet is presented and conceptualized in contemporary times?

Guillaume Côté: There's a famous reality show in Quebec called "Revolution," and it has these sequences of dance that are really punchy, and they have lasers, and they're really audience friendly, like "Dancing with the Stars" or something. I have people all the time telling me, "Oh, do you think it's doing great things for dance?" My answer is always, "I think it's definitely dance, but it's a whole other context."

People have to understand that when you come and see a live dance show, it's not going to be the same as you see on the film. If people come and see this show, they understand right from the get-go that we're at a certain pace, and we're developing something in a certain way.

I think dance in general has evolved because social media and all those things have impacted how dance is delivered. We can look at all the greatest dance productions online – we can look at how they're filmed for cinema, and they're high tech. So, it's more and more competitive. It's hard to make a show that's going to have an impact, and that people are going to feel like is something they haven't seen before. One of the things that we really love about this show – and the maturity of Robert, too, to have directed it in this way – is it's so traditional that it becomes almost contemporary. There's something familiar about the show because it's traditional. But it's also extremely contemporary, because it mixes different art forms, even in the dancing. We have classical ballet – obviously, dancers like Greta Hodgkinson and myself, who are very highly trained in classical ballet. But we also have contemporary dancers, and we even have breakers. Laertes (Lukas Malkowski) is a breaker. We use his strengths with floor work to complement this idea that he dances with Ophelia, who's a contemporary dancer, but then he dances with me, and I'm much more of a classical dancer. All these sorts of styles are incorporated. I think great art does mix things together in ways that are unexpected, and I think we did that while keeping a fundamental base of tradition.

EDGE: You'll be playing the role of Hamlet. Is it more of a challenge when you're choreographing for your own character?

Guillaume Côté: It's much, much easier to choreograph for the other characters, in a weird way. It's hard to have an outside eye. I had a really good rehearsal director who helped me assemble things. I'm humble enough when he's like, "No, I don't think this works," and "I think you need to redo this."

I really hated creating for myself, because there's something that happens with choreography, and I think the choreographer's job is always to extract the best qualities of your performer. I get a high from looking at this guy, Lucas, who's Laertes, who's the breaker. I get such a thrill at looking at, like, "Okay, how can I use his talents and craft them into something that makes sense to the Laertes character?" It always surprises me how different it is than what I pictured. But that's the great thing about collaborating.

"The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" comes to the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston Feb. 28 and March 1. For tickets and more information, follow this link.