“We’re trying to enchant the garden on the eve of the solstice,” says Jill Anna Ponasik, artistic director of Milwaukee Opera Theatre, about MOT’s new collaboration with Danceworks Performance Company at the Lynden Sculpture Garden. The combined music and dance companies will transform the woodsy art park into a living fairyland for audiences to roam on June 19 and 20.
The source material is Henry Purcell’s 1692 opera The Fairy Queen. Loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Purcell’s work imagines the daily lives of Shakespeare’s fairy characters and includes additional creatures such as Night, Juno and a drunken poet. Although the most famous aria belongs to Titania, Shakespeare’s words are never used.
Ponasik calls Purcell’s work “a baroque entertainment.” The opera’s slight narrative will be further abstracted in this immersive presentation in which audience members may encounter episodes in any order. “We’re not telling the opera,” says DPC’s artistic director Dani Kuepper. “We’re putting it into a blender.” There will be clear routes for those who want to follow them, obvious hot spots of activity and shepherds for lost souls.
The intergenerational cast includes 53 dancers, ages 7 to 77. Each created a fairy character that will live in the garden throughout the performance. Some are very funny, Kuepper says. The cast includes many professional dancers, UW-Milwaukee interns, and youth and seniors from Danceworks’ various programs. There’s a real-life family of four and several mother-daughter combos. The material was devised by the dancers under Kuepper’s direction. DPC company members choreographed solos involving the park’s sculptures.
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Twelve singers will haunt the park, many of them playing instruments, accompanied by additional violinists and horn players, a cellist and a harpsichordist. MOT’s artists transposed Purcell’s gentle score for the instruments available. These appropriately include sackbut, ukulele, baroque mandolin, baroque trombone, recorder and tambourine. Ponasik directed the singers and musicians to imagine themselves guests in the garden who, charmed by fairy lights, vanished on solstice nights long past and flicker back to our dimension each year at this time.
Picnicking is encouraged. The grounds open at 5:30 p.m. The performance starts at 7 p.m. and should end before dark. Children under 10 receive free admission. The Lynden Sculpture Garden is located at 2145 W. Brown Deer Road. Free shuttle service to and from the grounds is available at the I-43/Brown Deer Road Park and Ride. For tickets, call 1-800-838-3006 or visit fairyqueen.brownpapertickets.com. Rain date is Sunday, June 21 at 7 p.m.
