'MXE Milwaukee Mixed' and 'Momentum'

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“People should really celebrate the wealth and quality of talent in Milwaukee,” says Milwaukee Ballet artistic director Michael Pink, “and the Pabst Theater is where people are used to us not being formulaic.” His company’s show there this season will premiere five works by company choreographers and local composers: Garrett Glassman with the Tontine Ensemble, Timothy O’Donnell with Dasha Kelly, Isaac Sharratt with The Vitrolum Republic, Nicole Teague-Howell with LUXI, and Petr Zahradnícek with the Bonifas Electric Band featuring Brian Lynch. These will be Teague-Howell’s and Glassman’s first works for their colleagues. “Michael’s giving us a vote of confidence,” Glassman says. His dance is about cellphone addiction and personal isolation. Teague-Howell’s is about movement. “It’s about body language which we can all connect to,” she says. “It will be personal for everybody watching it.”

The talented international company-in-training called MBII will perform a showcase on Saturday afternoon featuring new works made for them by international choreographers Kathryn Posin and Mimmo Miccolis, recent work by Pink and O’Donnell and the classical gem Napoli by August Bournonville. Posin’s ballet addresses climate change and Miccolis tackles racism and homophobia. “As artists, we have a responsibility to address the crucial issues of our times,” says Posin. (John Schneider)

MXE Milwaukee Mixed runs Feb. 8-10 at 7:30 p.m. and Feb. 11 at 1:30 p.m. and Momentum is Feb. 10 at 1:30 p.m. at the Pabst Theater, 144 E. Wells St. Call 414-902-2103 or visit milwaukeeballet.org.

The following are comments made in interviews with Michael Pink, Garrett Glassman, Nicole Teague and Kathryn Posin, from which I’ve lifted the quotes I used in the preview above. I think they’re all worth sharing in their entirety. (John Schneider)

Michael Pink:

What I like about Milwaukee Mixed is that it’s all local people, including the musicians, so we’re building new relationships, new friendships. But it feels very much like it’s going to be a Happening. We’ll know when we get there. We’ve got exciting ingredients. Five people in the company who are really talented are creating these works. From what I’ve seen so far, they all have a real identity and uniqueness. We’ll have some live music, some recorded music and Dasha Kelly’s spoken word. We worked with Dasha many years ago when she came to work with the students in a master class on words and movement.

I know it’s going to be very interesting to the audience. We’re not going to have any barriers, the show curtain won’t there. So I’m hoping that people will feel even more relaxed than they normally do. People come to the Pabst and suddenly feel very different. We all stay connected. Whether you’re in the foyer or the theatre, you feel connected, whereas at the PAC everybody’s off in corners.

I like the fact that the music we’ll be playing is all being curated by 88.9 (Radio Milwaukee) so that it stays with that common theme that it’s all by local artists. We went to them initially to get some ideas about local musicians and that translated into them working with us a little bit more. They may be doing some DJ-ing on the first night. Their station and the Ballet are in the same neighborhood.

There’s no question that people should really celebrate the wealth and the quality of talent that’s here. It’s going to be challenging work. The Pabst seems to be the place where people are used to us trying things out, not being formulaic. And it’s such a lovely space to do that in.

And having MBII perform, to make that part of our time in the Pabst, I think is also important. It’s about time they get to have more lights and a bigger dance floor. And it brings the two groups closer together.

And Kathy Posin has done something that’s thematically very challenging. It’s all about climate change and it really works well, the way she’s costuming it and the different nationalities. I think people will say “yeah.”

Garrett Glassman:

This is my first time choreographing on the company, so it’s a really big deal for me. A lot of pressure. Michael’s giving us this vote of confidence which is really good but, of course, you’ve see all his shows and you know how much care he puts into them. What he puts on the stage has to be of such high quality and so for him to put that in our hands is, you know, a big responsibility.

I first met the Tontine Ensemble at last year’s dancers’ benefit. They played live to a video that (former Milwaukee Ballet dancer) Rachel Malehorn created. And I was listening and watching and I loved their sound. They’re based on improv which I love as well. And so when they sent the list of music from 88.9 – I love 88.9, I listen to that only in the car – there wasn’t anything that stood out to me and said “I need to choreograph to this music.” I could listen to it all day but it wasn’t really inspiring me to create movement.

So I immediately thought of Tontine because I also have a whole list of pieces I would love to choreograph to and the majority of them are string quartets and piano music. So I reached out to them at the end of last season, in June, and told them what this project was all about and asked if they would be willing to collaborate and if they had any piece of music that I could hear that would fit the bill. And there wasn’t really anything that they had already composed, so they actually made something new for me.

So I met with them in August. I had a whole idea for a piece laid out that I knew I could use at some point. So I explained it to them and we started from there and went through some sections, and they said, yeah we can do that kind of thing here, and use these techniques of string playing here, and so they finally recorded the piece in September and we’ve been rehearing to that. I would have loved to have them perform it live on stage but scheduling wise – we’ve already been struggling with five choreographers and multiple pieces, and the four of them all have full time jobs, so it would have been difficult.

The choreography comes from improvisation. I have a concept of the piece. It’s basically about people in our society now and how we’re all attached to our phones and our screens at all times, and how that’s getting out of hand to the point where we’re just losing our personal connection with people. We can’t seem to just put them down. It’s almost like an addiction. You look around anywhere, you see two people sitting on a bench together and both looking away from each other, or last week the (Milwaukee Ballet School) students were in class and it was like 7 or 8 moms all sitting on the couches waiting in complete silence and they were all looking down at their screens. It’s all you see now.

So these images that I keep seeing, I think they could be so powerful in a piece. So that’s the concept. How it’s just getting out of our control to the point where these tech companies who create these apps are, like, on the other side of the screen just pulling us in. You’ve got a lot of imagery of just being sucked into these screens.

I’m using old tube TV’s, both as a light source and also to symbolize screens that we are just drawn into and can’t seem to get ourselves away from. They’re always within arm’s reach. The piece is called AFFIXED because we are affixed to our screens and our screens are affixed to us at all times. There’s a lot of imagery of people looking down at their phones, of a posture that is kind of happening now. And it’s kind of futuristic. The audience will sit back and think: wow, is this where we’re heading? Is this me? Will this be me if I don’t learn to set these things aside and just for a moment look up from my screen? It’s dark and cold and industrial in the lighting and costuming and music as well. A lot of the music is really cool in that it doesn’t even sound like a string quartet, it sounds like metal rubbing on metal – it’s going to be really great, I think.

Nicole Teague-Howell:

Luxi was on a list of music that Jordan Lee of 88.9 gave us. I immediately fell in love with her sound. We have a lot of similar interests in music. So I got to work with her one on one and she created a brand new track for me. We talked about the idea of the piece and where we both wanted it to go. She envisioned almost more of a textured landscape, the way she described it. Almost like a flowing textured watery landscape is what she had in mind. So I kind of worked off her images and she worked off of mine. We met before I created the movement. Then she created the music. So the music definitely came first. But it was real collaboration.

I wanted to create a piece – I named it Pull – because all of the technique of dance, the imagery that I like to think of, always has two things pulling in opposite directions, like up and down, at the same time. So this is purely about movement. Pull is a verb. I want the movement to make people feel something, not necessarily to tell a story. I just want to make it about body language which we all can connect with.

It will be personal for everybody in the audience while they’re watching it. I feel like when you go into the theatre, you end up in your own experience because the whole theatre goes dark and no matter who you went with you’re alone in that moment and experiencing it just for yourself. So when I’m choreographing, I’m thinking about connecting with just one person, not a full audience. And I think it makes it more intimate.

Kathryn Posin:

As artists we have a responsibility to address the crucial issues of our times. The arts are just as responsible to this cause (climate change) as a political figure is -- if you choose to be. And I haven’t been a political artist, particularly, although I did a work about AIDS for Milwaukee Ballet.

The Gallatin School where I teach in New York is very much about social justice. And they held a climate change symposium. And I did a very humorous piece parodying Trump in relation to climate. And people that didn’t really care about dance suddenly liked my dance. So, oddly, it’s an inverse thing. You attract people who care about the issue of climate change and they come to see what someone is saying and they say wow, now I’m sort of starting to like ballet!

So this piece is a dark comedy called Climate Control 2 because I did one called Climate Control 1 already. On one side of the stage is a Polynesian girl in a hulu skirt who is being rained on and is crying. And on the other side of the stage is an Inuit Eskimo who is sweating and hot. So the climates have reversed.And in the dance is a hip hop male, a Balinese female, an Irish female, an Indian female, a Russian male and a capoeira dancing Brazilian. It’s about all the peoples of the world. It’s probably about too many things. Maybe that’s okay. It’s a collision of a lot of things. But isn’t life?

My message is that we need to be alerted to the fact that extreme climate conditions endanger us. And the quote above it is Stephen Hawking’s: “If we continue the way we are, in 2064 this planet will be as hot as Venus.”

I also have a fall back, which is that if people don’t get the message or even want to get it -- that there’s a danger to our planet – if I wasn’t able to communicate that because ballet doesn’t tell literal meaning – I’m also hoping to make it really entertaining and fun. So if people didn’t get the message, they can say wow, it’s a really fun complicated dance. I didn’t understand it but it was fun.