The Nancy Einhorn Milwaukee Ballet II (MBII) program is a kind of international grad school for ballet dancers. It’s hard to get into. Once there, you have a foot in the professional world, performing small roles and understudying bigger ones for Milwaukee Ballet. You train with professionals, perform for schools and community groups, and once each season give a major concert featuring work made for you by first-rate choreographers.
This year’s concert on Saturday at the Pabst Theater was outstanding. Even the title, Momentum, demonstrates the care directors Rolando Yanes and Mireille Favarel and the excellent faculty have for the future of their protégés. Michael Pink’s opening number for nine to Leonard Bernstein’s Candide overture was all momentum. The sweeping, high-energy choreography seemed second nature for these dancers who moved at speed in impeccable unison, sharing their delight all the while—a fitting introduction to a troupe bonded by work they love and believe in.
Three world premieres followed, each worth many more viewings. To his own increasingly ferocious (and gorgeous) music, choreographer Kristopher Estes-Brown took six dancers to their limits. Titled “distance, intimacy, and other observations,” these young men and women had to trust and help one another through multiple physical challenges. The sense was that matters are urgent and isolation an unhappy option.
Kathryn Posin’s “Climate Control 2” was explicit: All life is in imminent danger from global warming and, except when in the midst of a disaster, we ignore it. Her program note is Stephen Hawking’s: We’ve got 50 years unless we act. Justin Geiss played the central role of an agonized, unheeded scientist. Yoka Hirayama and Wyatt Pendleton were Polynesian and Inuit, respectively waterlogged and heat-drenched. An international cast played global partygoers, dancing beautifully, entertaining us.
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Mimmo Miccolis raised the house lights to connect our society with that of his story ballet, “(A)Mori.” It tells of the murder of an interracial couple in a Sicilian town, and of vases displayed there today to protest such hatred. With choreography of genuine originality, this touching piece honors love unbound by race and gender.
It was easy to follow the bittersweet text by Baz Luhrmann that accompanied Timothy O’Donnell’s “The Sunscreen Song”: advice on growing up successfully for folk the very age of Geiss, Pendleton and Kendra Woo whose bodies, vital in motion, seemed invincible. The concert ended with an August Bournonville classic, a kind of final exam.
