The Man Behind the Movement: Choreographer Leo Mujić on Bringing Hamlet to Brisbane

There is a line in Hamlet that Leo Mujić keeps returning to.

"Time is out of joint." It is Hamlet speaking — bewildered, betrayed, staring into a world that has come apart at its seams. Written over four hundred years ago, the words land differently now.

"Though it was written over 400 years ago," Mujić says, "this story could not be more topical. As Hamlet says, 'Time is out of joint', and in the world right now, we could all agree that we are, in many ways, out of joint and at war with ourselves."

The Croatian choreographer and director is in Brisbane to open Queensland Ballet's Australian premiere of Hamlet — a two-act neo-classical ballet set to the music of Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saëns, opening at the Thomas Dixon Centre on 19 June. It is a production that has been years in the making, and in Mujić's hands, it goes well beyond a retelling of Shakespeare's most famous tragedy.

"It's beautiful. It's eternal," he says simply, when asked why he chose this work. "I'm in the service of much greater people who came before me."

The Choreographer

That sense of humility is striking in a choreographer of Mujić's stature. He has created works for the Paris Opera Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Staatsballet Berlin, the New National Theater Tokyo, and theatres across Europe. He has choreographed Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pride and Prejudice, Dangerous Liaisons. And yet his approach to Hamlet is defined by an almost reverent restraint.

"I try not to reinvent it beyond recognition," he says. "For me, the contemporary approach is about keeping what the person imagines as much as possible. Speed up the dramaturgy, accelerate the flow, and ensure everything flows as one continuous experience."

The Music

At the heart of that process is music. The pairing of Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saëns is no accident. Mujić, who grew up in the former Austro-Hungarian region before leaving Yugoslavia at seventeen to study at the school of Maurice Béjart in Lausanne, has always been drawn to the tension between East and West.

"Saint-Saëns is French — a typical Western European tradition. Tchaikovsky was developing his work in Imperial Russia in a very different way. They were roughly contemporaries, but their worlds were quite different."

Tchaikovsky, as it turns out, wrote a lesser-known Overture for Hamlet — nineteen minutes of music that Mujić has woven throughout the ballet. The challenge was making two very different composers feel like one seamless emotional world.

"Unless someone is highly musically educated, the audience should not necessarily feel where one composer ends and another begins. To create that harmony across the score is the most difficult part, and that responsibility belongs to me."

The Collaboration

Working alongside Mujić is dramaturg Bálint Rauscher — a long-time creative partner whose role in the process is more central than audiences might realise.

"I don't do this alone," Mujić says. "Much of the musical structure was developed closely with Bálint. We spend a lot of time listening to music — more than anything else in the process of creating."

Rauscher graduated from the Hungarian Dance Academy in 2011 and built a distinguished career as a dancer with the Serbian National Ballet and the Croatian National Theatre, performing works by choreographers including Wayne McGregor, Ohad Naharin and Edvard Clug. As a dramaturg, his collaborations with Mujić span ballet, opera and musical theatre across Europe — bringing intellectual rigour to what might otherwise remain purely physical expression.

"Steps themselves are not important," Mujić says. "They are motion. They have to be technically precise and dynamically phrased, but I try to avoid a literal gesture. Every movement is in service of what William Shakespeare wrote. I try to remove myself and simply follow what the character is saying."

This is what Mujić calls neo-classical ballet — classical in its technical rigour, but infused with contemporary floor work and a distinct movement vocabulary for each character. The role of Hamlet moves differently to Ophelia. The court moves differently to the ghost. Every physical language is earned.

Theatre For Everyone

For Mujić, the production carries a responsibility that extends beyond craft.

"Audiences deserve to experience Hamlet fully. Theatre is there not only to satisfy educated, cultural people who know what it is — we are making art for everybody. Today, nobody can afford the luxury of being elitist about art."

He has noticed something in the Australian ballet landscape this season. Queensland Ballet is presenting Hamlet. The Australian Ballet, Romeo and Juliet. West Australian Ballet, Othello and Macbeth.

"Shakespeare is everywhere," he says, "and I think he always will be. When the audience leaves the theatre, the work should hit them somewhere — in the brain, the stomach, the heart. If someone who has never been to the theatre decides to come back again, I think we've done our job. We make theatre for that person."

Hamlet runs at the Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre, 406 Montague Road, West End, from 19 June to 18 July 2026. Tickets at queenslandballet.com.au.

Photo: Leo Mujić. Photo: Boris Scitar. Rehearsal images: Angharad Gladding.