Photo by Nathaniel Davauer
Michael Pink’s Dracula is frightening in the manner of its source, the Bram Stoker novel that gave us the modern vampire. The adult victims are as innocent as the child that the vampire Lucy seduces for food. Hunger is no metaphor and vampires can’t be understood in terms of human psychology. They’re a lethal disease that must be stopped.
Pink was almost 40 and tired of ballet’s preciousness in 1996 when Dracula premiered. His first act is entirely Jonathan Harker’s PTSD nightmare. Home from Transylvania where he’s sold English real estate to Dracula, Harker is drugged and violated in the dream, first by female vampires, then by Dracula. He wakes up screaming for his new wife, Mina. It’s a shock, then, when Act Two arrives as a traditional ballet with fashionable English couples dancing at a plush seaside hotel. Lucy could be Aurora from The Sleeping Beauty, courtly suitors vying for her hand. This lovely ballet slips into another tempo and dimension when nightmare becomes reality and Dracula descends in shimmering blue and violet light to feed on Lucy.
Then there’s Renfield, a human horror writhing on the set’s upper level like a bug at the back of the brain, hungry for vampire power while Lucy’s friends grieve and struggle to understand what’s happened to her. In Act Three, Dracula feeds Renfield to the undead corps de ballet, the tragic Lucy among them, her mouth so smeared with blood it hurts to look at her. Even Mina is powerless against the demon Count, as we see in the third of this ballet’s sensational pas de deux. No supportive partner is Dracula for Harker, Lucy or Mina, but a dominating, coldblooded, beast-like controller.
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In trailing the hypnotized Mina, the men find Dracula’s lair and destroy him. That spectacle is breathtaking but profoundly bleak. Evil exists; there’s no happy ending.
Actually, every scene in Milwaukee Ballet’s production was breathtaking. Lez Brotherston’s designs and David Grill’s lighting are masterworks. Philip Feeney’s harrowing score reaches almost unbearable emotional heights, as conductor Andrews Sill and the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra amply demonstrated. But it’s Pink’s courageously ambitious, character-driven choreography that makes Dracula such good theater.
Both casts were perfect: Davit Hovhannisyan and Alexandre Ferreira as Dracula; Patrick Howell and Timothy O’Donnell as Harker; Luz San Miguel and Annia Hidalgo as Lucy; Susan Gartell and Nicole Teague as Mina; and Marc Petrocci and Garrett Glassman as Renfield.
