Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
It was fitting that a dancer, Parker Brasser-Vos, welcomed the audience on opening night to Milwaukee Ballet’s eighth Genesis: International Choreographic Competition. This was their show, a program of world premieres by choreographers and dancers in their twenties and thirties sharing their skills and visions to create ballets in their voices.
Each choreographer works with eight dancers, four men and four women, drawn from hats at the first rehearsal. Audience members vote, as they leave, for the choreographer they’d like to see return to make another new work. There’s little time to think before voting. A day later, I’m still thinking. These were very different, very brave and heartfelt dances addressing big spiritual, political and environmental matters. So, forget the competition part; it’s clear these artists would give their all under any circumstances. Let’s hope this show is the genesis of ongoing relationships with choreographers Cass Mortimer Eipper, Aleix Mañé and Kenneth Tindall.
Tindall’s “Beyond the Break” opened the show on opening night. The title comes from something the English songwriter Paul Weller said to his son: humans are pebbles from one broken rock, scattered across the earth. That notion of individual genesis from universal wholeness was manifested in gorgeous dancing. Tindall let his cast do what each does best in the style that suits each best. We saw the group shatter. Individuals sought and found contact or suffered isolation. This was a healing dance.
Mañé is Catalonian. His “ExiliO” addressed the current political crisis in Spain through images of the human cost of the civil war that produced a dictatorship there from 1939 to 1975. Accompanied by fierce, anguished contemporary Spanish songs, the cast portrayed exiles. Freighted with sorrow, they’d sob, run, collapse and help each other on, as fearful and determined as asylum seekers at America’s borders. This was dance as Greek tragedy.
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Eipper’s Australian homeland is burning from climate change. While creating his dance, “Spur,” he experienced our polar vortex. His dancers bobbled as atoms in the microcosmic ecosystem underlying evolution, parts of nature as we all are. (Competition-wise, I worry for Eipper that his dance was marred on opening night by poor sound production during a recorded text about the science.) Stage lighting turned alarming as the dancers, human now, eloquently fluttered or executed odd non-sequiturs. The music grew creepy, then terrifying. The abrupt blackout left me gasping. This was a spur, I think, to action.
Extra! Extra! The judges chose Aleix Mañé winner. The audience chose Kenneth Tindall.
