By the time Isabelle Kralj founded Milwaukee Dance Theatre in 1987, “I already coupled dance with theater,” she says. “My love was always in the combination.” Meanwhile, Mark Anderson moved from Milwaukee to Seattle, a city with a larger experimental performance community. There, he polished his skills as a writer and monologist, creating theatrical images through word and movement in the manner of performance artists of the ’80s.
On a visit home in 1996, Anderson worked with Kralj on a minimalist dance and dialogue adaptation of the film classic It’s A Wonderful Life for her company’s holiday show. In 1999, he joined MDT as Kralj’s co-artistic director. They married in 2000 and together fashioned a performance style which draws freely from dance, spoken text, music and visual art, a style called hybrid. In 2008, they renamed the company Theatre Gigante, a tease on the small size of their operation and the large scope of its ambitions.
“It’s our driving force to push the boundaries of the art form,” Anderson says. “Without the avant garde in art, we don’t progress, we don’t grow; we don’t find new ways of doing and being and thinking.”
The most recent example of their unique work was last fall’s revival of My Dear Othello, the couple’s original take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, created in 2004 in response to the invasion of Iraq. Little of Shakespeare’s text made it into the show. “We took race and age out of the story,” Kralj explains, “and focused on people’s fear of other parts of the world and the fact that we went into Iraq based on lies. Lies led to a preemptive strike on that country. The act of killing, as in Othello, came as the result of lies. So we decided to repeat Iago’s act of lying over and over while slowly adding to the story.” Their first-rate collaborators included composer Seth Warren-Crow; artist Schomer Lichtner; performers Janet Lilly, Tom Reed and Michael Stebbins; and designers Rick Graham and Marion Clendenen-Acosta.
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Creating theater from scratch is very time consuming. How does Gigante produce an entire season?
“Mark and I want to bring to Milwaukee work that we love that is out of the mainstream, work that we know would never get here without us,” Kralj answers.
The company’s next production is Terminus by Dublin-born playwright Mark O’Rowe who stands with Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh as a major voice in contemporary Irish theater and whose work has never been seen here. Kralj, Reed and Megan Kaminsky will perform it in May under Anderson’s direction at Kenilworth Studio 508, a comfortably cozy East Side theater that serves Theatre Gigante’s work nicely.
“It’s a play by a playwright,” Anderson admits, “but the way O’Rowe has created it is what gives us the theatrical charge.” The script is composed of three interlocking monologues written in tough urban verse that is as musical as the best rap and spoken word poetry. The story is surreal, supernatural, metaphysical and dark. Reed plays a serial killer who loves pop songs and sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a beautiful voice he’s too shy to use. Kaminsky plays a girl who falls in love with the killer’s soul when it comes to independent life as a monster. Kralj plays her mother who tries to atone for crimes she’s committed against her daughter. “It’s unlikely any other company would do it,” says Anderson.
Theatre Gigante maintains a Walker’s Point studio at the Pitch Project, 706 S. Fifth St., where it offers a studio series, most recently the Parisian singer-songwriter Christine Zufferey. There is an international character and currency to Gigante’s work. The company regularly tours in this country and in Slovenia where Kralj has strong ties.
“Theatre Gigante tries to be a container for a wide reach of different kinds of performance,” Anderson says. “We make them or we see somebody do them and we think it would be great to show them to our friends in Milwaukee.”
Theater’s great boundary pushers have also been its preservationists, renewing for their time the art form’s value to individuals and societies. Kralj and Anderson’s work is idiosyncratic in the ideal sense. They stand in the line of modern theater pioneers. As a longtime fan, I’m moved by the joy they communicate in performance, however dark the tale, and by the intelligence of their productions, both original and imported.
Theatre Gigante performs Terminus at 7:30p.m., Friday and Saturday, May 1-16 at Kenilworth Studio 508, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For information, visit theatregigante.org.
