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For the fourth year, Milwaukee Ballet’s pre-professional company MBII and the South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center offered a unique program of legendary ballets and worthy world premieres beautifully costumed and staged in a hall small enough to feel intimate.
At a baby grand upstage center, pianist Daniel Boudewyns was the backdrop and soul of Chopiniana , a dance visualization of Frédéric Chopin’s powerful waltzes by the pioneering fin de siècle choreographer Michel Fokine. Seventeen young women in traditional white dresses with fairytale wings and a young man in black and white are posed with gasp-inducing beauty as the curtain lifts. Steps one learned in ballet school are intelligently deployed to make Chopiniana an epitome of what we now call classical ballet, at once romantic and intellectually rigorous. In this staging by MBII Director Rolando Yanes, the man (Andrew Wingert) is part of the fabric and the female corps matters as much as the soloists (Lauren Dove Watts, Ryoka Chiba, Itzel Hernandez). No showing off; the work’s idealism is too great for that.
A rousing Russian group number from the now standard 1948 version of Marius Petipa’s Raymonda offered plenty of flash, an exquisitely danced solo by Hernandez and fine partnering by Wingert. Marie Varlet, a polished MBII dancer, and Mengjun Chen, an artist in Milwaukee Ballet’s main company, were radiant in the pas de deux from Sylvia with its famous pizzicato passage by composer Léo Delibes, first choreographed in 1876 by Louis Merante.
These works are great-grandparents of contemporary ballet. While they offer many pleasures when young dancers tackle them, they reflect political realities and economies that may haunt us but are not ours. New work matters greatly. MBII presented three, all gorgeously danced.
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Isaac Sharratt’s Greener Grass is set to a remix of Chopin’s famous E-flat Nocturne and was a witty follow-up to Chopiniana . A wry sketch of guys from different cultures seeking or clinging to direction and identity, it’s funny and feels true.
Adam Sterr’s Winter’s Fences and Timothy O’Donnell’s …and then it rained are smart, sexy works that deserve many more performances. Sterr wove into his dance two violinists and two viola players (touchingly, he was one) performing Philip Glass’ “Mishima” string quartet. His fiercely longing dancer characters would belong in any of that Japanese writer’s novels. O’Donnell creates floods of movement in a single dancer’s body. With ten and Max Richter’s music, the impact is sensational and profound.
