Photo Credit: Nathaniel Davauer
Re.gen, Milwaukee Ballet’s trilogy of resurrected dances born of Genesis, the company’s singular international choreographic competition, is the first live performance I’ve attended in over 13 months. Making the familiar drive to the Baumgartner Center for Dance on opening night, I realized it was also the first nighttime drive I’d taken since COVID hit. I’m vaccinated but I was nervous.
The audience was limited to just over 40, so parking was easy. The doors, we were told, would open at 7:15 p.m. and the show would start at 7:30. Tickets were digital, texted to cellphones that had to be removed, along with keys and other metals, for a friendly weapons check (ugh). I was warmly guided by masked young people to my socially distanced, preassigned seat in the alternating rows used for seating. Every seat provides great viewing. I tried to calm myself as other masked guests trickled in.
A pre-show video was running onstage. We saw the dancers rehearsing this performance while its three choreographers spoke about the works we’d see. My anxiety began to lift, and I could hear Brazilian choreographer Mariana Oliveira explain on video that though she hadn’t won the 2017 Genesis competition, the joy of working with these dancers was her greatest prize. Emotions filled my body. I was back in a theatre.
The room went dark. Artistic Director Michael Pink’s recorded welcome started with “Thank you for trusting us.” He asked that we respect the artists, staff and fellow audience members by remaining masked and leaving expeditiously the way we’d entered when the one-hour, intermission-less show ended.
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Sensuous Energy
Then the slow, intoxicating beat of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero began, and the company’s now long-time resident choreographer Timothy O’Donnell’s dance interpretation of that famous orchestral piece was underway. What daring, I thought, to create movement to this music; and how wise to avoid Spanish dance references. O’Donnell tied his fiercely challenging steps to the music’s structure, matching its sensuous energy, drawing us into it gut-deep. Glowing in Dan Ozminkowsky’s spectral lighting and the body-hugging costumes by Mary Piering and Siebers, the masked dancers made the choreography look easy, as if music, not muscle, supported them. We could feel it in our own bodies. This is live theatre.
O’Donnell and the dancers are colleagues. He could regenerate his dance, premiered in 2010 as part of his winner’s prize from Genesis 2009, with and for them. Isaac Allen, Josiah Cook, Craig Freigang, Alana Griffith, Elizabeth Harrison, Marie Harrison-Collins, Itzel Hernandez and Barry Molina were breathtaking individually and in every kind of partnering.
I actually reviewed the premieres of each dance in this program. That first Bolero is a distant happy memory, but images from Enrico Morelli’s The Noise of Whispers and Oliveira’s Pagliacci—finalists in Genesis 2017—have stayed with me. Pink has talked for years about reviving these dances, along with other company-born works.
Morelli’s dance is philosophical. Lizzie Tripp danced the protagonist, a woman searching for, let’s say, some meaning to life. With superb flexibility and control, she showed that inner ache. After an uneasy duet with boyfriend Davit Hovhannisyan, she joined a lost crowd led by Marize Fumero and Randy Crespo. It was a busy, contradictory crowd of individuals moving to “noise” composed by Adrien Casalis. But when the saving sound of Chopin’s 1st Piano Concerto arrived, the crowd including Garrett Glassman, Kristen Marshall, Benjamin Simoens and Lahna Vanderbush, became a creative community connected by art in service to beauty.
In Oliveira’s Pagliacci, dancer Parker Brasser-Vos is a sensitive performer playing Pierrot in a company of clowns. A classic Commedia dell’Arte scenario has this character in love with the saucy maid Columbina (Annia Hidalgo), who taunts him for the fool he is. Here, Oliveira and the dancers make it clear that the dancer himself is in love for real, and he’s really a fool to think his cast mate will return it. Can he continue to perform the role, one that’s been around for centuries? Hidalgo and the other dancers, led by Marko Micov playing Harlequin, gave their hearts completely to the work of putting on a silly show. All, including Abigail McGahey, Francesca Morris, Michael Rinderlee, Haille Rodriquez, and Ransom Wilkes-Davis, were perfect dressed in red clown noses over white protective face masks.
“Re.gen” runs through May 2. Visit milwaukeeballet.org to stream or see it live.
