By Emily Bromberg, MCB corps de ballet dancer One of Shakespeare’s most beloved characters, Juliet, is a young girl who believes in eternal love, so much so that she trades her life for it. She is a girl we all know well, but what does it mean to a ballet dancer to get to become Juliet on stage? How does one prepare? Read what becoming Juliet means to Miami City Ballet dancer Emily Bromberg below… Jennifer Kronenberg in John Cranko’s “Romeo and Juliet.”Photo by Kyle Froman.

And, watch our video, “Insights: Becoming Juliet”to find out how principal dancers Jennifer Kronenberg and Patricia Delgadochanneled their inner Shakespeare character in John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet.

Working on the role of Juliet is such a rich experience. To put it bluntly, I’m beside myself with excitement, but I won’t talk too much about that because I can’t lose my present focus. The opportunity to portray a character like Juliet, with everything I have in me as an artist, as a dancer, and as a person, is a gift I hold closely. As an artist and a dancer, the role of Juliet is, for me, a dream (it feels like I’ve entered a candy store with one giant bag!). As a person, I have found many ways to relate to her character. There is nothing like a first love. But experiencing real love at a young age of fourteen,(like Juliet) is something else. I was fifteen when I began to fall in love for the first time. The world was ours. I thought no one else could ever understand what I have because I thought for sure, they have never experienced love like this. Not this strong, not this intense. As adolescents in love, my “beau” and I were an unstoppable force. Add the nature of our age–stubborn, determined, innocent–to one of the most powerful feelings of all–love–and all limits are off, for nothing can stop the joy that fills every cell of our beings. Nothing can stop the naive nature of pursuing this pure love no matter what the circumstances are.

This world without boundaries that Romeo and Juliet live in for a short time, is something very familiar to me. But as the story unfolds, and Juliet grows from child to woman in a few short days, she inevitably feels the loss of her first and only love, the loss of her innocence as a child, and the loss of her trust in the world. These are all feelings of a broken heart. My first love was everything to me, and experiencing that loss left me broken in so many ways. I didn’t know where to turn, who to believe, which of my own feelings to trust. It made me crazy for a little while! Though poisoning myself was never an option for me, I can certainly understand why a character like Juliet can be driven to do so.

I am so looking forward to becoming Juliet on the stage and inside this beautiful yet heart-wrenching story. For me, and what I know about love and the world that surrounds it, this is one of the most meaningful roles I could ever get the opportunity to work on, sweat over, and essentially become.