Photo Credit: Eric Olson
Halfway through its 50th season, Milwaukee Ballet is looking back to Ballets Russes, the groundbreaking company of choreographers, composers, dancers and visual artists assembled by Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev in Paris in the early 20th century.
Artistic director Michael Pink has taken a Diaghilev-like position vis-à-vis his company’s annual winter show in the history-drenched Pabst Theater. He’s encouraged three talented company artists to break ground in new works set to great music by Diaghilev superstar Igor Stravinsky. Resident choreographer Timothy O’Donnell has The Rite of Spring, dancer Nicole Teague-Howell has The Firebird, and dancer Garrett Glassman has the lesser-known Les Noces. After seeing them all in rehearsal, I can tell you that none is in any way an attempt to recreate an earlier version. Each tells an original story in a personal choreographic style. Using an alternate, more phonetic spelling, the concert that contains these thoroughly engaging one-act ballets is called Ballet Russe Reimagined.
O’Donnell won Milwaukee Ballet’s international choreographic competition in 2009 and joined the company as a choreographer and performer in 2012. Teague-Howell and Glassman made their choreographic debuts in last winter’s concert at the Pabst. They’ve all danced many of Pink’s story ballets and spoke warmly in our interviews of his influence on these three works.
‘Les Noces’
Glassman’s piece is laugh-out-loud hilarious. He’s turned the original story on its head and used an altogether different score, Stravinsky’s earlier one-act operatic ballet Pulcinella, which is based on the commedia dell’arte clown we’ve come to know as Punch, husband of Judy. Les Noces means “The Wedding.” In the 1923 original, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, younger sister of the Ballets Russes’ star Vaslav Nijinsky, it’s about the terrors of a young peasant bride facing an arranged marriage, crying to her bridesmaids that she doesn’t want to do this.
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Glassman’s wedding is the normal, present-day kind, and it’s the groom who gets cold feet. After his live-in fiancé leaves to spend the night before the ceremony elsewhere, his groomsmen surprise him at home with drinks and plans for a wild bachelor party. Finding him anxious, they attempt to cheer him. The shenanigans are highly inventive and choreographically dazzling. “It’s fun to make people laugh without using words,” Glassman says. “This is different from my typical, contemporary, abstract movement style. It’s more human-like movement, 100% dance-theater. It’s been a nice change and a challenge, as well.” He calls his piece I Do, Don’t I?
‘The Firebird’
Diaghilev wanted something exotically Russian to draw the Paris audience to his opening season in 1910. So, Stravinsky and choreographer Michel Fokine invented an original fairy tale with typical Russian folk tale characters and scenario. They matched music and action tightly, a challenge for Teague-Howell in designing her own story. Moreover, she found the power of the music, especially the finale, “a bit intimidating,” she says. “What can you do with something so gorgeous?”
What she’s done is using the fairy tale’s lovers, villain and magical firebird to address contemporary concerns of abuse of power. “The evil character,” she explains, “is symbolized by a male dancer, but you can take it as oppression or abuse in any sort of way. It’s whatever is dragging you down: a boss, a government, etc. It’s about rising up. The firebird is a woman. In the beginning, you see that she has risen up from something. Then you watch another woman, who is any woman, all women, going through the same thing, and you see how the first woman helps this other woman through it. That’s what makes her magical. And there’s a corps of women who, together, basically reflect her journey in a dream world.”
‘The Rite of Spring’
“For the first time ever, I’m telling a story,” O’Donnell says about this newest addition to his substantial choreographic repertory. It’s the shattering story of three real people: Diaghilev; his great dancer and one-time lover Vaslav Nijinsky; and Romola de Pulszky, who married Nijinsky while Ballets Russes toured Brazil in 1913, the year Nijinsky choreographed Le Sacre du Printemps. The couple had two children before Nijinsky succumbed to schizophrenia and lifelong institutionalization.
Stravinsky was an unknown composer when Diaghilev had him create this score, which still ranks among the greatest musical works of the 20th century. Nijinsky’s original ballet depicted fanciful Russian pagan rituals meant to cajole the gods into bringing back spring. It ends with the sacrifice of a young woman chosen to dance herself to death. O’Donnell’s story starts with Diaghilev discovering Nijinsky, bringing the boy to the company and making him his lover and star. We see the company at work, dancing O’Donnell’s most complex contemporary ballet choreography to date. There’s the passionate Stravinsky; there’s Léonide Massine, who’ll replace Nijinsky in Diaghilev’s arms and as his star, precipitating Nijinsky’s mental breakdown; there’s the dancer Romola, steadfast in love. As O’Donnell puts it, “My first question was: Who made the biggest sacrifice?”
Feb. 13-16 at the Pabst Theater, 144 E. Wells St. For tickets, call 414-902-2103 or visit milwaukeeballet.org.
