Côté Danse’s Hamlet at Wolf Trap by Audrey Brown

Côté Danse’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Produced by Ex Machina

Wednesday, September 17th, 2025, 8:30 PM

Filene Center, Wolf Trap

Written by Audrey Brown (@audrey.e.brown)

Banner photo courtesy of Wolf Trap / Rei Leinam

A danced production of Hamlet ends where it started; or, rather, it had started where it ends.

We all know, whether or not we’re familiar with the intricacies of the plot, that Hamlet is a deeply tragic Shakespearean work. Thusly, Ex Machina and Côté Danse, in their entirely danced version of the classic, refuse to indulge the possibility that audiences to its “contemporary-slash-neoclassical Western dance company’s” staging of the classic might be surprised at the final scene’s bloodbath, instead cluing them immediately into the fact that the breathing bodies they see onstage throughout the piece will cease to breathe at its closing.

Etienne Lavigne, artistic producer of the show and Côté Danse, and Drew Lichtenberg, artistic producer at Shakespeare Theater Company, relayed in a preshow talkback to last Wednesday’s performance at Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts that, though there was no spoken dialogue in this version of the story, the dancers’ movements were inspired by the words of William Shakespeare’s text, from “that this too, too solid flesh could melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” to the now-oft-repeated adage “the rest is silence.”

“So it’s almost like Robert and Guillaume are picking up where Shakespeare leaves off, saying, ‘what if the beginning is silence? Where do we go from there?” said Lichtenberg in the talkback. What if the beginning is the end? What if the dancers’ “too, too solid  flesh” is all that is keeping them from melting into that fated dew? Where do we go from there?

I’m struck by the relevance of all these Shakespearean musings as I watch the bodily eloquence presented by the Toronto-based Côté Danse in partnership with Robert Lepage’s multidisciplinary company Ex Machina. For better or for worse, it has been top-of-mind in my day job about our willingness to release names of prominent or political figures ahead of their public appearances in the wake of a recent, highly publicized death. “What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be an animal—the human animal? What does it mean to have consciousness?” asks Lichtenberg, reminding the audience that Yorick’s skull will famously pop up later in the performance. And somehow, as always, here comes Shakespeare with a proposal to those questions. In this performance, Shakespeare is willfully silenced, allowing the dancers’ bodies to channel his words, Hamlet’s thoughts, hundreds of years of actors’ stories, as expertly as any spoken script.

As above, the piece literally starts at its close; a chair is overturned and dancers’ bodies are revealed collapsed haphazardly across the floor. As the music begins, they slink offstage in moves that emulate street dancing while Lavigne, who choreographed the piece and also plays the titular character, rights the chair and takes an introspective seat.

It is through Hamlet’s eyes that we see much of the dancing, from Ophelia (Miyeko Ferguson)’s exuberant movements–accentuated by her neon pink shift dress–to the forthcoming vision of his father’s ghost. As the dancers’ living bodies reassume their shapes, the company convening at a dinner table that first mimics Da Vinci’s Last Supper but soon morphs into a mechanical, repetitive set of movements, all dancers in sync, Hamlet sits alone at stage right, stagnant in his chair, brooding.

It’s the thoughtfulness of the design of the entire piece, its precision rivalling Hamlet’s own, that makes Côté Danse’s piece a joy to witness. True to form, Hamlet’s father comes to him in a vision early into the production. Often, thanks to a commitment to Renaissance-era limitations, King Hamlet is merely a bodily incarnation, sometimes accompanied by an influx of stage fog, or sometimes, the character is a disembodied voice played through the theater. Here, the limitations are different–for a role in which dialogue plays a vital part in establishing the character, but a production in which the audience’s understanding of aliveness has been established through movement, not words, how does one portray death as it returns to life? The answer comes in the form of a simple sheet that ascends from its position shrouding the dead figure, becoming the barrier between Hamlet and a set of dancing figures in a ghostly puppet show. If the images here could haunt my nightmares, I’d let them. Through recognizable bodily shapes, a set of three dancers tell the story of King Hamlet’s murder, including his brother’s affair with his wife and the subsequent fallout. Without knowing the context of the characters’ identities, the gravity of this information is missable–but the simplicity of the shadows’ shapes still clues in the watcher that there is something afoot, and the visuals are a chill-inducing treat nevertheless.

“If the images here could haunt my nightmares, I’d let them.”

“..it is essentially a pas-de-deux between Ophelia and the water, leaving the audience as breathless as she below the water’s surface.”

A fabric scrim much like the one used for the ghostly scene above makes its return for an equally haunting Hamlet classic. Without dialogue, it’s more difficult to see Ophelia’s descent into madness save for a scene where she literally tiptoes around a physical altercation with Polonius (Michel Faigaux)—she, in her hot-pink gown, appears more sparingly in general. However, the mythos of Ophelia has entered enough into the common realm that as soon as she sheds that same gown, revealing a bathing suit-like leotard beneath, in front of a pure blue sheet, the audience anticipates what is to come. Thanks to the simplicity of the sheet and, assumedly, some unseen bodies behind what becomes a birds-eye view of gradually intensifying moving water, we see Ophelia contemplate her fate and then gracefully leap into the lake, first mimicking calm swimming motions while suspended from behind and eventually conceding to a whirlpool of fabric as she is submerged forever. It is the very minimalism of the sheet and the danced body onstage that makes the scene memorable: it is essentially a pas-de-deux between Ophelia and the water, leaving the audience as breathless as she below the water’s surface. The space surrounding the stage, Wolf Trap’s characteristic outdoor quietude, echoes with crickets that enhance the atmosphere of it all. Throughout, their chirping fades into the background, but it is in moments like this where the harmonies of the night both lend themselves to the otherworldliness on stage and ground the audience in reality.

Also enhanced through Hamlet’s eyes are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, danced wonderfully by Jake Poloz and Willem Sadler. In my mind, their two characters are never the most memorable, save for the verbal ring of their combined names (hence the root of Tom Stoppard’s tragicomedy). However, here, perhaps also thanks to the pared-down cast of characters, Poloz and Sadler steal their scenes. They are the most up-to-date with their dancing, even verging toward street dancing styles at points, and when they first take to the stage, they have no choice but to mimic one another’s movements exactly. However, when Hamlet enters, he disrupts their twinship, and the three alternate between leaping after one another in three-person canons and taking three completely different paths. It is as though Hamlet is the only character who can differentiate between the two of them, allowing them to develop unique personalities and gain favor with the audience at large. It is also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who return for the “play-within-the-play” in attempts to undermine King Claudius, dressed in papier-mâché masks of the king and his predecessor. To a Washington, D.C.-area audience, where masks and effigies of our ruling class are no strange sight—and sometimes even appear encased in gold on public lands—the masks are appropriately jarring, initially leaving me wondering if they were meant to be more blatant images of those currently in power rather than replicas of the dancers onstage.

Of course, an existing knowledge of the story of Hamlet was helpful in viewing Côté Danse and Ex Machina’s version of the production. With no leeway for dialogue, even I had difficulty recognizing certain scenes and discerning what dialogue might have applied to different visuals. However, wishing for a direct translation from Shakespearean scene to Côtése scene is perhaps reductive: regardless of the context provided, the point got across the same. In fact, the aspect of the Côté Danse and Ex Machina piece that jarred me the most was the attempt to insert some language: above the stage at certain points, one would see a set of Shakespeare-esque typeface accompanied by the sound of typewriter keys. I found that the inclusion of these excerpts from the text, from “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” to “to be or not to be” was merely an attempt to include the most well-known lines from Hamlet somewhere; at times, they were misplaced and had little to do with the upcoming scene but to loosely retie the audience to the origin text. Without any recognizable text, the dancers’ bodies and sparse staging were enough.

So, the production ends as it began. We’ve sat through nearly 2 hours of dancing only to conclude with nothing having progressed or made sense of itself. Or, perhaps, the answer has been implied all along: the “too, too solid flesh” that has contorted itself from tumble to leap has made its impression, coming alive for the brief, ephemeral period of watching merely to move and to indulge in a story. Accented only with instrumentals, and the occasional audible gasp for air, Côté’s production has briefly talked through Hamlet in body alone.

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