Photo Credit: Rick Brodzeller
“My last bow will be in blood, sweat and tears,” says the great Milwaukee Ballet dancer Luz San Miguel. Blood because, before she dies as the vampire Lucy in the last act of Michael Pink’s Dracula, she will have feasted on the ravaged Renfield, smearing herself with that liquor; sweat because the dancing is ferocious; tears because this weekend’s run will mark her retirement from the stage.
“It’s like a full circle,” she says. “Knowing about Dracula attracted me to the work of Michael Pink, and the first ballet I danced in Milwaukee was Dracula, so it just made sense that the last one would be Dracula.” She’s never danced better than in recent years, but, as she says, “a ballet career is so unfair, because you reach your artistic maturity when your body is saying ‘slow down.’”
In her native Madrid, from age 8 to 17, she studied ballet with Carmina Ocaña whom she calls her second mother and who’ll be in the audience to honor her student’s farewell performance on Saturday night. “Everything I am I owe to her,” San Miguel says. “She believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself.”
At 17, San Miguel left Spain with a one-year scholarship to Antwerp’s Municipal Institute of Ballet. At 18, she was dancing professionally in Germany, first with Leipzig Ballet, then Dresden Ballet where she stayed for five years. It was during those years (1996 to be precise) that Pink’s Dracula premiered at England’s Northern Ballet Theatre. “It was all over the dance magazines,” she says. “We all knew about this great Dracula. Somebody showed me a little clip of it, and I thought, oh my god, I want to be part of that!” She was, in fact, unhappy with ballet. “I was working in an environment that I didn’t like, and I just thought, if this is the ballet world, I don’t want it.”
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Across the English Channel, Pink had had a similar experience. He’d trained at the Royal Ballet School. He’d wanted to act in musicals and needed dancing lessons. Since he excelled, the school’s directors pushed him to a ballet career. After a decade dancing with international stars in the English National Ballet, “I woke up one morning saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore; it’s nonsense,’” he told me. He quit.
His dear friend, the late Christopher Gable, was director of England’s Central School of Ballet. Gable coaxed him into teaching. Pink created a company of young dancers at the school, the model for Milwaukee Ballet’s MBII. Then, Gable was hired as artistic director at Northern Ballet. He asked Pink to make a ballet, one he could believe in. With composer Philip Feeney and designer Lez Brotherston, they made Dracula. None of them expected it to be the hit it was, much less remain in the international repertory as it has.
“Chris Gable shared the same frustrations about dance and its meaningless, vacuous traits at its worst,” Pink says. “This had to be different. And this is what it meant to be different: To take a serious story and tell it well and yet provide all the dance opportunities, the theatrical opportunities. Dracula is the beginning of the reason I stayed in dance.”
‘This is My Place. I Found Home’
Gable died in 1998. San Miguel’s ballet master in Dresden was hired as Northern Ballet’s director. He offered San Miguel a job there. “Oh great, I thought, I’m going to work with Michael Pink!” she remembers. “Then, I learned he’d left England. I didn’t take the job. To make a long story short, my career took me to America.” She was hired by Tulsa Ballet where again she felt misplaced. “Then I heard that Michael Pink was director of Milwaukee Ballet.”
When her contract with Tulsa ended, San Miguel auditioned for Pink and was hired. “The first ballet I did was Dracula,” she says. “I was Lucy right away. This is the fourth time I’m doing it. I fall in love with this ballet every time. Every time it’s new because I’m older; things have happened in my life. The ways in which Lucy is different each time are the ways in which I am different.”
About Milwaukee Ballet, she says, “Right away, I felt this is my place. I found home.” In the past 13 seasons, she’s created leading roles in Pink’s La Boheme, Peter Pan, Dorian Gray, Mirror Mirror, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, Giselle, Coppélia, Don Quixote and Cinderella and in dozens of premieres by guest choreographers. She’ll continue to work with the company now as one of two ballet masters, sharing that title with Denis Malinkine, Pink’s original Dracula. But this Dracula is San Miguel’s. “For somebody as important as Luz, such a great artist who’s contributed so much,” Pink says, “it’s good to think: How would she like to go out?”
Milwaukee Ballet performs Dracula Oct. 25-28 at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts’ Uihlein Hall, 929 N. Water St. For tickets, visit milwaukeeballet.org/performances.
