It’s a special thrill when long-time artistic partners return to one another.
Guillaume Côté and Sonia Rodriguez shaped Canadian ballet for more than two decades as Principal Dancers at the National Ballet of Canada. Reunited, they are living that thrill, both personally and artistically, in the dance dramatization of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark.
When the production returns to Toronto for a limited run at the Elgin Theatre on April 24–26, 2026, it carries with it the legacy of their shared history. Rodriguez retired from the National Ballet of Canada three years ago after a 32-year career, but now steps back onto the stage, alongside Côté. “For me, it’s been great. That’s what I’ve missed the most,” Rodriguez enthuses during a joint conversation with Côté over Zoom. “I was very grateful to get that phone call from Guillaume and just get me off my butt!” she laughs. “To have that opportunity again of being in the studio was great… it’s been amazing!”
The duo’s reunion is not simply nostalgic. As both artists describe it, it is a recalibration of process, of presence, and of what it means to tell a story through the body.
Beneath all those words
Co-created by Côté and visionary director Robert Lepage, the production reimagines Hamlet as a 100-minute dance work, stripped of its famous soliloquies and nearly all spoken text. Drawing on the collaborators’ shared affinity for Shakespeare, the work employs the language of movement and music to render the play’s pivotal moments and emotional complexities, immersing audiences in a metaphorical world of betrayal and trickery where ghosts and humans coexist.
Performed by a cast of nine dancers with Côté in the title role and Rodriguez in the role of Gertrude, the production foregrounds the play’s emotional and structural core. This is a deeply resonant story of grief, power, and moral paralysis that is carried through gesture, proximity, and physical tension. With a dramatic score by composer John Gzowski and an inventive interplay of light and shadow to shape the staging, this virtuosic reinterpretation lends new dimension to Hamlet’s melancholy and inner conflict, offering a visceral point of entry for a wide range of audiences.
Côté is clear-eyed about the central challenge of adapting a famously text-heavy play like Hamlet —and why he believes it can work without its language. “People say, and scholars are saying a lot, that the real reason why these soliloquies were written is because there were some huge set changes going on, and they needed more time. So [Shakespeare] kept adding lines to the soliloquy,” he says—before clarifying that he is “not demeaning anything… These soliloquies are super amazing and important.”
What interests him most lies beneath the language. “What we wanted to highlight was its skeleton. The reason why this amazing play is successful is because of its structure. It’s an action play. It works within its interactions—and not because it’s a piece of literature.” Côté’s provocative take: “Hamlet should be experienced as a piece of play: more of a visceral, and less of an intellectual, experience.”
Rodriguez agrees, noting the production’s quietly radical accessibility: “It’s quite incredible, crazy even, that we think Shakespeare is all about words. But here we are … able to tell the story without them,” she notes. “Even people who’ve never read the play before… are able to come in and just full-on enjoy it, and get the story, and understand all the themes.”
Instinct and elasticity
While the work strips away linguistic excess, the process of creating it is far from simple. For Rodriguez, re-entering the rehearsal room was like stepping onto a moving train. “I got to learn the production on my own, mostly, and then was thrown in with a cast that had been already performing for over a year,” she recalls. “And literally, in our first rehearsal, we were kind of running [it through]. But we had danced together for so long that, honestly, it was just like second nature.”
That sense of instinct and a shared physical language built over decades is one of the production’s newest and most compelling undercurrents. Côté traces it back to their earliest collaborations. Rodriguez was his first partner in his first full-length ballet. “I was 19 years old. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he recalls with a smile. “She was the most gracious, the most generous… always so kind and always so patient.”
In Hamlet, their shared history allows them to navigate some of the work’s most psychologically complex terrain—particularly the fraught relationship between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude. Here, the choreography moves from confrontation to intimacy, and from restraint to something more volatile and ambiguous. “We get to do this really heated, almost violent pas de deux together,” notes Côté, “which turns into a bit of a sensual, weird Oedipus complex. Somehow with Sonia, we were able to—kind of unspokenly, in a way—go into that.”
This injection works because what distinguishes this Hamlet, beyond its wordlessness, is its elasticity. While the structure remains fixed, the choreography shifts in real time, with the performers’ instincts. Côté makes it clear that the movement changes from performance to performance: “only the steps that will feel genuine and feel right are necessary. There’s a fluidity within its rigidity.”
And Rodriguez just loves it: “Being able to just see what happens in that moment that day, it’s really exciting. It varies depending on the energy that we’re carrying. There are always different nuances. It keeps it alive!”
Collective simplicity
Côté takes pains to stress one more major difference in this Hamlet. His Hamlet (shared with Kealan McLaughlin on April 26) and Rodriguez’s Gertrude are very much part of a larger collective, rather than singular focal points. “The star is often Hamlet. But in our show, it’s not,” he states. “It’s the cast,” which includes Lukas Malkowski as Laertes, Carleen Zouboules as Ophelia, Robert Glumbek as Claudius, Natasha Poon Woo as Horatio, and Michel Faigaux as Polonius.
The ensemble reflects the production’s blending of classical, contemporary, and street dance vocabularies, which come to life against the production’s backdrop of stripped-down theatricality. Emerging from pandemic constraints, the design intentionally embraces the “very simple idea” of shifting tables, curtains, and lighting… an “analog” world, in which “there’s as much choreography backstage as there is on stage”—with performers transforming the space in full view. Within this simplicity, certain images resonate with particular force, including Ophelia’s drowning—which Côté calls “the simplest thing you’ll ever come up with,” yet which “feels absolutely magical” in context.
For Côté, the emotional core of Hamlet—and of this dance adaptation—is equally simple: the unflinching portrayal of loss and inevitability. In returning to the stage together, Côté and Rodriguez bring these feelings into sharper human focus, as two artists drawing on decades of shared experience to inhabit a story that resists resolution.
“You can suffer and try to be the right person. It won’t change the outcome,” a philosophical Côté muses. “Sometimes, really amazing people end up not winning. But that’s how the world works.”
Ex Machina and Côté Danse’s production of The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark is at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre on April 24 – 26, 2026. Tickets are available at showoneproductions.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
