Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
Encore, Milwaukee Ballet’s season closer, opened on June 3 before a small, highly engaged audience in the company’s Third Ward studio theater. Three classical and three contemporary works were performed in an intermission-free hour. Our pre-assigned seats were nicely distanced. Each view was excellent. We all wore masks, but the dancers’ eyes spoke. They performed as if for friends in someone’s living room, albeit one equipped with superb sound and lighting.
Encore was about them, a show of accomplishment. Any performance in this pandemic-time is an accomplishment, but Encore was designed by director Michael Pink to show how the dancers have used this time to grow in skill, range and confidence; how new-comers have become family members, and long-standing artists have deepened their artistry. An evening of excerpts from longer ballets was a good way to do that. No stories, just gorgeous music and dancing.
The title reads several ways. Yes, these works were all danced at some point by Milwaukee Ballet, but ballet history was also reprised. Encore opened with the “pas de dix” (dance for 10) from the ballet Raymonda. The choreography descends from Marius Petipa’s 1898 original for the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. It offers tons of those demanding steps we now call classical. The stirring music unfolds in short movements that accompany five male-female couples, with one couple featured. Women and men also dance in gender-specific groupings, each with its challenges. The principles dance bravura solos and duets meant to floor an audience.
Star Couple
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Lizzie Tripp and Davit Hovhannisyan were the star couple. Hovhannisyan has danced here longer, I believe, than anyone in the current company. He’s given his life to this work, and his tour de force turns, leaps and lifts seem second nature. His feats of strength have eloquence. Tripp, always charismatic, showed a mastery of classical style. For example, during a long, slow solo en pointe her feet almost never touched ground. I doubt that the impact of that will transfer to video, but the show is available on the company’s website.
Next was a dance as unusual as the first was classic. Nous Sommes (We Are) is an internationally beloved pas de deux that its choreographer, Jimmy Gamonet, staged for Milwaukee Ballet in 1999. Gamonet died this year from Covid. Annia Hidalgo and Parker Brasser-Vos danced the work in tribute. It’s about profound interconnection, about what it means to be “we.” It opened with Brasser-Vos flat on his back on the floor with his hands at Hidalgo’s waist, holding her body stretched full length above him in mid-air. More astonishments followed. Brasser-Vos never looked stronger. With Hidalgo’s serene, intelligent, crystal-clear dancing, their work was a moving memorial.
The “Peasant Pas De Deux” from the mid-19th century ballet Giselle followed. Alana Griffith and Barry Molina made the old moves new. Her 180-degree leg extensions and perfect pointe work, and his classical turns and leaps, were light as air, unaffected, endearing -- just good dancing.
First Place Winner
The Catalonian dancer/choreographer Aleix Mañé won first place in the company’s 2019 Genesis competition with ExiliO, his one act ballet honoring the many people—his relatives among them—forced into exile by the Spanish Civil War which brought the dictator Franco to power in 1939. Hovhannisyan and Lahna Vanderbush performed an emotional excerpt. She might have been unconscious when he carried her in. She wakes in a kind of delirium. They dance together, lost, directionless, their lives completely upended. They have only each other. Then he disappears. She’s alone, and never more so. Vanderbush nailed the acting and dancing.
Brasser-Vos had a great night. He returned with Garrett Glassman and Itzel Hernandez in excerpts from choreographer Trey McIntyre’s A Day in the Life, danced here in 2016. Against songs by The Beatles that fashioned cells in the bodies of my generation, the dancers embodied the exuberance, turbulence, and self-mockery of the psychedelic 1960s.
Hidalgo had a great night, too. The show closed with a scene from Michael Pink’s Don Quixote. A pas de dix in classical style—five couples, the men wielding capes like bullfighters, the women managing hand fans—framed a multi-part grand pas de deux that’s pure Pink. Hidalgo and Randy Crespo danced the leads, executing gasp-inducing one-armed lifts and mid-air splits, close-to-the-floor catches, grand jetes and multiple fouettes, all the classical moves a ballet audience cherishes. Crespo danced with immense abandon. Hidalgo brought her sense of humor and customary self-assurance. It was big fun.
If an encore acknowledges accomplishment, Encore also recognized communal need and service, people working together for the larger good. Every dancer in the show, and everyone behind the scenes, deserves honor.
Encore runs live and On Demand through June 13. Visit milwaukeeballet.org.
