Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
Milwaukee Ballet’s spring program last weekend was “about dance,” said artistic director Michael Pink in his welcome speech. In fact, we were given a precious glimpse of international developments in the art form from a company already international in its make-up. We saw world premieres by Italy’s Enrico Morelli and Britain’s George Williamson, along with Lambarena by America’s Val Caniparoli. Lambarena is a unique piece that’s been danced by many companies on four continents since its birth in 1995 and that combines ballet, born in France, with African dance.
At an excellent pre-show talk by the choreographers on opening night, Caniparoli explained that Lambarena was inspired by its music, a blend of Johann Sebastian Bach and African songs. (Example: a flowing choral adagio over rhythmic handclaps.) He wanted to combine earth and sky, he said, referring to the pulled-up character of ballet and the low center of gravity in African dance. He made the dance for San Francisco Ballet with the help of African dance experts. The Milwaukee dancers, with help from Milwaukee’s Xalaat Africa Drum and Dance for Life, handled the work’s many challenges beautifully, turning strenuous quick shifts of styles into joyous dancing, pure and simple. Opening night performances by Marize Fumero, Alana Griffith, Itzel Hernandez, Parker Brasser-Voz, Randy Crespo and Davit Hovhannisyan in major roles were great fun. The dancing made its point, too: we can believe in a common humanity.
Morelli’s dark new drama is titled Compieta, the night-hour prayer in Christian tradition (Compline, in English). Memories, Morelli explained, especially of his mother, inspired this gorgeous, haunted, compassionate, surrealist work for a superb cast of 16 led by Lizzie Tripp and Garrett Glassman, with Patrick Howell and Nicole Teague-Howell in featured roles. In imagining his mother’s life, Morelli’s passionate scenes inspired reflection on life’s greatest mysteries.
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Williamson’s Albatross was at least as resonant. Never literal, the choreography suggests a flock of the eponymous seabirds in flight or on water. To postmodern music with mythic reverberations, a man and woman (Hovhannisyan and Teague-Howell, sensational) meet and mate for life, as albatrosses do. They have a son (Barry Molina, superb) who grows, meets a man (Glassman, excellent), falls in love and leaves. The firmly homebound parents’ devotion to one another deepens as they age together, no longer able to physically fly but soaring in spirit, their perfect love, that ideal, perhaps a kind of albatross around their son’s neck.
