Milwaukee Ballet’s All-Female-Choreographers ‘MKE Mix’

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Image: Milwaukee Ballet - milwaukeeballet.org

Milwaukee Ballet ‘MKE Mix’

Milwaukee Ballet ‘MKE Mix’

“MKE Mix”, Milwaukee Ballet’s annual concert of contemporary works, has an all-female cast of choreographers this season. Nelly van Bommel and Gabrielle Lamb are past winners of the company’s prestigious Genesis International Choreographic Competition in 2007 and 2013 respectively. As winners, they returned a year later to create their second world premieres on the company, and Van Bommel returned again last year to restage her delightful Gelem, Gelem, built on Roma music and dance. Now they’re premiering works in “MKE Mix,” alongside a freshly staged 10-year-old piece by a choreographer new to Milwaukee, Penny Saunders.

“The fact that there are three female choreographers on the program is something to celebrate,” Saunders says, “since it doesn’t happen frequently.” Still, she adds, “I’d rather be called a choreographer than a female choreographer, because you wouldn’t say ‘male choreographer.’ I just want to be good at what I do.”

Saunders’ Soir Bleu shares its title with Edward Hopper’s painting of a somber soirée with seven very different individuals in an open-air café. Several Hopper works inform the dance. “It’s not a straight story” Saunders explains. “His characters are often not touching, not looking at each other, but they look like they’ve just experienced something or are about to. I was intrigued by what that was or would be, so I’m making my own little stories.

“I also dove into the relationship he had with his wife, Jo,” she continues. “She was also an artist, but gave up her career to support his, like a lot of women did back then. I was drawn to the fact that she had to give up what she loved. He was revered as one of the most interesting American painters. What could she have been, had she been able to stand on her own? So in the pas de deux, you can tell there’s a hierarchy. And there’s a trio for the women, a lot of it on the floor as if they’re models, where the woman is told to sit still so he can capture the work. Woman’s issues have become a theme for me. It’s the thing I identify with most when I do stories.”

North African Pop

Van Bommel’s piece for 12 dancers is titled Nadir. “In Arabic, it means a culmination, either good or bad,” Van Bommel explains. The musical accompaniment is a mix of North African pop songs from the ‘50s and early ‘60s, mixed with arias from European opera and operetta. The pop songs are sung in Arabic and French because North Africa was colonized by France. “The positive aspect of that,” van Bommel says, “are the fruitful collaborations between French speaking Algerians and the French musicians living there.

“I’m not sure that all those collaborations would have happened without the pressure for North African composers to fit into a pop model that would sell in Europe,” she continues. For example, her Nadir includes a half-French, half-Arabic rendition of the American hit about an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini. 

There’s also a personal connection. Van Bommel’s two great-aunts married Algerians and lived in Algeria until the 1962 war drove them back to France, where they were considered traitors. Born and schooled in northern France, Van Bommel is half-French and half-Dutch. “I’m not patriotic at all,” she says. “What interests me is that those pop songs are mostly joyful while the era was very traumatic.”

Well-Tempered Jazz

Gabrielle Lamb is experimenting with point work. “It’s a skill I’m trying to improve,” she tells me, “and I thought this would be a good place because they’re very good at it. It isn’t what we always see in classical ballet. I’m steering it in my direction. I have two male-female couples, a male couple, and a female couple. I wanted to work on a duet for two women en pointe because that’s very hard. You’re not stable when you’re wearing point shoes.”

Her music is Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier with contemporary jazz variations on Bach’s works woven in. As Lamb sees it, “Bach’s music is a thread. He works in long strands of melodies that go back and around and into knots, especially in fugues where there’s multiple voices. So my choreography has long threads. Especially in partnering work, you’re knotted up. I named the piece Filament for light threads, glowing arcs of movement through space.

“My career has been a winding path and there’s a Milwaukee thread running through it,” she says. “When I was 18, I came for a Milwaukee Ballet summer program.  When I was 20, I was an apprentice here for a year. Flash forward many years and I came back for Genesis, and then the following year after winning, and now ten years later for this. Winding threaded paths is my theme, I guess.”

Performances are May 16-18 at 7:30 p.m. and May 19 at 1:30 p.m. at the Pabst Theatre. Visit milwaukeeballet.org or call the company’s box office at 414-920-2103.

Following the May 17 performance, Van Bommel will give a brief demonstration of her creative process with members of Milwaukee Ballet’s Second Company, free and open to all attendees of that evening’s performance.