Looking Ahead:
Last year, Andre Watts and Andreas Delfs teamed up on Beethoven’s 4th concerto with all the expected fireworks. So they decided to do it again this year, but with a new partner in the mix: the piano. Watts opens the new Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra season with a performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Concert (No. 5), performing it on a brand new concert grand. By Steinway, of course. We expect Concertmaster Frank Almond will also be there with his new Lipinsky Stradivarius, adding some sweetness and light to both the Emperor and the Brahms 3rd Symphony, which opens the program.
If you prefer Broadway to Beethoven, you’ll likely be heading west to Brookfield’s Wilson Center on Friday night. Stephen Schwartz, the musical mind behind the ever-popular Wicked and the ‘70s-era musicals Godspell and Pippin, will have some magic to do with a couple of guest vocalists in a concert billed “Stephen Schwartz and Friends.” As lyricist, Schwartz has also been a part of several Disney animated movies, as well as last year’s charming Enchanted. Expect a nice mix of the cynical and the slightly sappy.
Not to be confused with that other Stephen, Stephen Shore was also quite busy in the 1970s – roaming the U.S. and taking photographs. Shore spent some time hanging around with Andy Warhol, so it’s not surprising that there’s a conceptual edge to his work – his pictures often document his day-to-day existence. But Shore was also one of the first photographers to champion color images and his work from “Uncommon Places” is beautifully crafted as well as conceptually rich. This is the final weekend of his retrospective at Marquette’s Haggerty Museum of Art. To paraphrase Bob Uecker, “Get up, get up. Get outta there! Go see it!”
Looking Back:
The ghost of industry hovers over Wild Space Dance Company’s “On Sight: Menomonee Valley.” Staged on the grounds of the old Milwaukee Road engine plant in the Menomonee Valley, the audience moves through the space (now called Chimney Park) like widgets on an assembly line, absorbing one visual element after another. Debra Loewen says the company’s latest piece adds up to a vision of work and the industrial past that is both celebratory and mournfully nostalgic.
First and last there is the celebration of the present, or what remains. Dressed in white, dancers ring one of the massive smokestacks that remain on the grounds, embracing the brick surface as a child would its mother. Using poles, they vault against it. They peer up its height into the sky (in the hazy darkness Saturday night, the mysterious towers seem to stretch into infinity).
In between the company explores other parts of the space. They bang on the girders that support the 35th Street Viaduct, making haunting music. Dancing under it (it makes a perfect found-object stage), they recede farther away from the audience, figures in the one-point perspective of a Renaissance painting. At the end, they use a horizontal beam to tell a great visual joke. Lying inside it, one dancer pops her head up while another drops her feet down – creating the illusion of a 20-foot tall person reclining languidly after a hard day at the factory.
In the middle of a small pond, a tuxedoed man sits at a table, drinking champagne and reading. A lone cello plays in the background while a servant attends to him, wading through the water to light his cigarette. Work is noble and good, but ownership does have its rewards.
In the final section, tumblers flip and leap off sections of culvert, half buried in the ground. A quartet of dancers builds patterns using poles that sweep through a layer of gravel – a janitorial ballet. The Milwaukee Ballet’s Yuki Clark does spritely, balletic turns on a railing that overlooks the space. Dancers run, halt with a skid on a gravel path, and move back to the chimney. The final image: a dancer ascends a ladder to climb into the chimney itself. Inside, she turns her gaze upward – curious, fearful. The lights fade.
