Milwaukee Ballet ‘Pushes’ the Art of Dance

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Milwaukee Ballet presented a trio of highly original contemporary one-act ballets at the Marcus Center last weekend, including two world premieres and the revival of a past favorite, all by rising international choreographers. PUSH was the program’s title. Whatever old images the word ballet conjures, forget them.

Choreographer Aleix Mañè Sáez from Spain won Milwaukee Ballet’s international choreographic competition, “Genesis,” in 2019. The prize included a commission to create a second work for these dancers in 2020. The COVID lockdown arrived during final rehearsals and Mañè Sáez and the dancers have waited over two years to bring their work to an audience.

It’s titled SixthBreatH. I’ll never forget it, just as I’ll never forget the work that won Mañè Sáez the commission. That work was inspired by his ancestors’ flight from the Spanish dictator Franco; this one by the courage of a friend diagnosed with a terminal disease. His work is dramatic and deeply felt. It asks, as I said, everything from dancers, and in this case, especially from its protagonist, created for Lizzie Tripp who did the role full justice. Even standing still, she was riveting.

The title comes from the musical composition Sixth Breath, The Last Breath by the prolific Italian composer Ezio Bosso, who died in 2020 at age 48 of a years-long degenerative disease. Among many other things, he composed music for ballets.

The dance starts with Tripp sitting on the floor in a dim spotlight, her back to us, flesh visible, touching her hair with minimal movement, listening at length to a recording of woman singing a powerful Spanish lament. Then Bosso’s music starts. A company of shadowy dancers appear in the darkness around her. They’re the life she knows she’ll lose. With intense involvement, she witnesses a couple—Annia Hidalgo and Davit Hovhannisyan on opening night—dance their love in astonishing partnering, with strings of lifts I’ve never seen. Tripp, weighted by grief, does a quiet, haunted solo. Then others come to help her to new vitality. It leads to a moment of blinding white light and a kind of ecstatic dancing I found completely convincing.

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Born in Spain, choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo became Chicago-based in 2008 as the resident choreographer for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. He created his feathery fantasy Extremely Close that year and restaged it in 2012 for Milwaukee Ballet. In 2020, he became the first ever resident choreographer at Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet.

It’s another unforgettable piece. White walls reveal and conceal bits of life as dancer’s slide them left and right, on and off stage, to music by Philip Glass and Dustin O’Halloran. The stage floor is filled with white feathers that fall like snow, and then randomly fly as they meet dancers’ moves.

Make of it all what you will. It’s fast-moving, delicate, filled with surprises and mood shifts, solemn in its ending. Its lovers were beautifully performed by Alana Griffith and Hovhannisyan. Eight other dancers looked happy to play in a formal world as light as air. In a standout role, Garrett Glassman was elastic and vital.

Choreographer Stephanie Martinez’s El Maestro pushed PUSH to a joyous ending. It was the evening’s second world premiere.

A much-awarded Chicago-based dance artist, Martinez identifies as a woman of color. She’s the founder and artistic director of Chicago’s PARA.MAR Dance Theatre, a repertory company championing diversity. El Maestro honors the life and work of Francisco Toledo, an internationally celebrated indigenous Mexican visual artist who died in 2019. El Maestro, Martinez writes in a program note, “explores Toldeo’s inner mind: a world filled with mythical animals, folk tales and an eternal devotion to the people and culture of Mexico.”

The curtain raised on a sweet painted canvas, Toledo-style, representing a bit of the Maestro’s house. Placed off center, it was big enough for a backdrop but nowhere near the size of the Marcus stage. It represented the Maestro’s house. A ladder and an open window provided spots for our artist hero to view the world.

In a breakout performance, Craig Freigang danced the role, drunk on joy because the world that unfolded around him in dance was the world he loved most, the world of his imagination, the world he would spend his life painting and sculpting and drawing. It was embodied with perfect abandon by thirteen dancers, all to a series of glorious Mexican songs.

True to her subject, Martinez managed to feature every dancer in the cast. Faster and faster, the women in pointe shoes danced as freely if they were barefoot. When our hero is thrilled by a kite, others bring more kites, and the artist is lifted and flown like a kite. “PUSH” couldn’t have come to a happier end.