Otello Ballet

OTELLO - BALLETTO DI ROMA | Dance
Ballet in two acts
Duration: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes, including intermission

The Balletto di Roma has always promoted Italian auteur dance, presenting itself on the international stage with research-driven projects, productions, and collaborations that combine tradition with innovation, expanding the company’s presence in Europe and around the world. For the Balletto di Roma, choreographer Fabrizio Monteverde revisits one of his most acclaimed Shakespearean productions, Otello, which debuted at the Civitanova Danza Festival in 2009. This production offers a provocative and exaggerated reading, where even some emphatic flourishes of the Bohemian composer Dvořák find their fitting place, serving as a subtle ironic counterpoint to the characters’ actions.

In the 2025 version, Monteverde continues to reinterpret Shakespeare’s text, focusing on the psychological turning points that shape the complex and ambiguous dynamics among the protagonists Otello, Desdemona, and Cassio. In this never-equilateral triangle of relationships, the three vertices are constantly interchangeable, largely due to Iago’s intrigues. The setting in a modern seaport—a declared homage to the vivid cinematography of Querelle de Brest (1982, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder)—clarifies and expands the central idea: if Otello has always been a “different one,” an outsider, it is also true that a port quay is a kind of “free zone,” a limbo where one arrives or awaits departure. The strong presence of the sea, not merely relegated to a picturesque backdrop for Venice as in Shakespeare’s text, evokes secrets, the incessant stirrings of passion with their stormy unpredictability, and the inevitable slips into forbidden territories of pleasure, jealousy, and crime.

Program and cast

Music: Antonin Dvořák
Choreography: Fabrizio Monteverde
Costumes: Santi Rinciari
Organizer: Antico Teatro Pagliano