Photo via Facebook / Milwaukee Ballet
Live dance for a live audience is alive again in “Ballet Beat,” Milwaukee Ballet’s community-wide summer program of workshops and performances. To celebrate this joyful fact, the “Ballet Beat” performance finale is bigger than ever, and rich in its range styles. Free for all ages, the two-part outdoor performance will be presented on July 28 at the Indaba Community Band Shell of the St. Ann Center at 2450 W. North Avenue, and again at the Marcus Performing Arts Center’s Peck Pavilion downtown on July 31. Both shows begin at 6:30 p.m.
It’s a program unlike any you’ll see all season. Part One offers dances by distinguished guest artists, including timely world premieres by the Catey Ott Dance Collective; a classical Indian Kathak dance from a master, Cyenthia Vijayakumar; and the powerhouse drummers and dancers of Xalaat African Drum and Dance for Life.
Classic Work, Too
Part Two is a mix of excerpts from classical and contemporary ballets, including a timely world premiere from Milwaukee Ballet choreographer Timothy O’Donnell, created in collaboration with Milwaukee spoken word poets Mikey Cody Apollo and Michaela Lacy, and hip-hop choreographer and dancer Joshua Yang, to music by Ultra Max.
Dancers from the main company and its professional training program will perform five additional 19th-21st century dances, including the work that brought O’Donnell to Milwaukee from Australia, to music by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Adolphe Adam, and American choreographer and composer Kristopher Estes-Brown.
Catey Ott Thompson is in her ninth year of teaching teenagers in the Milwaukee Ballet Academy. Her two new works for this program address some pandemic-induced psychological struggles that many of us will recognize. The first is a solo, Congruent, which Ott Thompson will dance at the St. Ann Center. The second, In Good Company, will be danced by a trio of company members at the Marcus PAC. Ott Thompson worked digitally with Baltimore composer Tim Nohe to achieve a perfect blend of music and movement.
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The dancer in her solo seeks “patience, and to tame a wave of trepidation,” Ott Thompson says. She created key parts of the dance in front of the campfire during a family camping trip this summer. “It was turning to nature for inner calm,” she explains, “It was finding the elements—earth, fire, water—to bring a sense of peace, a sense of horizons, of width, of witnessing—to bring that calm into being.”
In Good Company takes the next step. “Winter was full of pandemic funk for me,” she continues, “so at the first rehearsal, before the dancers came, I was just on the floor, trying to get up. How do I find the inspiration to move the way I used to? But through the rehearsal process, together we dug ourselves out of that place,” she says. “It’s a piece about isolation and trying to connect through that isolation.” Masks were necessary when they started rehearsal in December. Now they’ll wear them as part of their costumes but take them off as the dance ends.
“It’s definitely been a journey from pandemic style dancing in the kitchen,” she concludes. “I’m trying to really look at what it is that I still hold onto, and continue to strive for, as a dancer and as a human being.”
For details on Ballet Beat and its Finale, visit milwaukeeballet.org
