Milwaukee Ballet’s Knock-out Season Finale

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Milwaukee Ballet closed its season last weekend with MKE Mix, its more or less annual program of contemporary ballets by distinguished guest choreographers. For the first time, all three choreographers were women. 

Both Gabrielle Lamb and Nelly van Bommel are past winners of the company’s Genesis International Choreographic Competition. For both women, this was their third world premiere created on the company’s dancers. New to Milwaukee, Penny Saunders and the dancers brought new life to a 10-year-old Saunders ballet that artistic director Michael Pink felt belonged in this Mix.

The concert was a knock-out. We saw three highly original, contrasting pieces that showed the dancers at their very best in terms of virtuosity, in-the-moment presence, and complete communion with the choreography, the music, and their fellow dancers.  That’s my biggest takeaway; that and the fact that Michael Pink knows how to choose good choreographers.

Lamb’s Filament opened the concert in pure dance style to gorgeous piano compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and Bach-inspired compositions by pianist Brad Mehidau. For a start, the four male dancers – Eric Figueredo, Garrett Glassman, Barry Molina, and Flynn Stelfox—and four female dancers – Marie Harrison-Collins, Kristen Marshall, Jacqueline Sugianto, and Lahna Vanderbush—looked sharp in the skin-tight orange costumes by Christine Drach, intensified by Jason Fassl’s shades-of-red lighting. 

Fascinating Entanglements

Arms and hands wide and reaching, move followed move as your own might if you were alone in your home hearing Bach and inspired to wild freeform movement. The women explored the possibilities of point shoes, but every dancer’s movements were exempt from classical rules. There were cool pas de deux by Glassman and Stelfox, and Figueredo and Sugianto. Molina was at his dreamy best in a closing solo. There were fascinating entanglements for the whole cast, and equality in every tangle. Unpredictable individual movements unfolded with great skill in long strings. The result was hypnotic and nothing but gorgeous. 

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Wow, I scribbled, as the curtain rose on Saunders’ Soir Bleu. The cast of seven was already in action at top speed to a fast piano sonata by the 17th century German composer Johann von Westoff. As in the original scenic design by Michael Mazzola, an angled wall of mirrors framed by smeared white paint covered the area upstage right, while a multi-paneled, white window frame hung downstage left. The stand-out colors were blue, turquoise and purple in Mark Zappone’s costumes—calves-length dresses for the women, and pants, shirts and sweaters for the men. Fassl’s lighting was painterly in its use of light and shadow. The reflection of the dancers in the mirrors was a great effect.

Saunders paid tribute in this work to the famed American painter Edward Hopper whose mysterious characters were part of what inspired her choreographic imagination. Her other inspiration was Hopper’s wife Jo, who sacrificed her own artistic career to enable her husband’s.

Good acting played a big role in this dance. Early in the piece, a vibrant, energetic Glassman confidently danced with the mirrors squarely centered at his back. In contrast, Alana Griffith was outside the mirror at its far edge. She was crumpling and slumping to the ground, her energy depleted. Then she joined Parker Brasser-Vos, Craig Freigang, Alexander Koulos, Kristen Marshall, and Jacqueline Sugianto at the hanging window where, I think, whatever they’re looking for is invisible. Sugianto and Koulos danced an pas de deux in which his control is assumed and she’s his obliging puppet. To the saddest music, Griffith, Sugianto, and Marshall danced as the painter’s models, soul-depleted and devoid of individuality, beneath an ugly yellow overhead light that descended from the rafters for the occasion. There’s a fast-paced, technically awesome soiree for the seven dancers, but the piece ends with one man standing as the stage goes dark.

Here’s my intermission note: “It’s like a fabulous meal, something so out of the ordinary, so unrepeatable—like the Northern Lights or the Grand Canyon at sunset.” 

The capper was Nelly van Bommel’s Nadir. The audience was laughing from the start when dancer Marko Micov burst onstage in front of the curtain and realized he’d started too soon. My joy quadrupled when the bright, bouncy, “itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini” tune I’d loved in grade school in the 1950s started, sung in French. One by one, the cast of 12 bounced across the Pabst Theatre stage leaping, twirling, and cavorting in silly positions.

Nine tunes from that era followed in various languages. Images of catastrophe—a stage full of dead bodies, for example—were brushed away by this society of 12 dancers, so they and we could delight to the whimsical, uplifting, jaw-dropping, desperate dancing of Micov, Randy Crespo, Marize Fumero, Daniela Maarraoui, Lizzie Tripp-Molina, Alysssa Schilke, Ben Zusi, Amanda Lewis, Raven Loan, Brasser-Vos, Freigang and Koulos. I can’t wait for next season.