Looking Ahead
Say it with me, now: “Ah, Bach.” You don’t get a chance to say that too often these days. Falling somewhere between the early music territory and standard symphonic fare, Bach’s orchestral and choral work is somewhat hard to find in performance, save the occasional amateur choir or church concert. So we expect lots of Bach lovers to descend on Uihlein Hall this weekend for the Milwaukee Symphony and Chorus’ performance of J.S. Bach’s B-Minor Mass.
While Bach’s mass has been known to bring tears to some people’s eyes, there will probably be more sniffles heard at the Skylight’s Spitfire Grill, James Valcq and Fred Alley’s beautiful song story of new beginnings. The show has had quite a beginning of its own. It opened to Off-Broadway on September 7, 2001, and closed (along with many other New York shows), a few weeks later in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. The show has become a staple in theaters since then, and is sure to be a hit as the Skylight mounts it for a second time.
Celebrity watchers will be out in force to see Barbara Walterscontinue to tell all on a book tour for Audition: A Memoir. While Walters was a trailblazer in broadcast journalism, the first woman to host a network news program, she’s also been the subject of criticism (not to mention Gilda Radner routines) for softening up the news and edging further and further into celebrity obsession. You can judge whether it’s worked or not – her appearance is sold out.
Looking Back
Set against the marble glow of Calatrava’s horizontal mine-shaft of a hallway (the Walter Schroeder Galleria), Santiago Cucullu’s installation, MF Ziggurat, is a bit underwhelming. The assorted elements are too spread out and symmetrical – the TV’s set evenly in the nooks against the west windows – to generate the kind of visceral reaction that is the obvious goal of the piece. Cucullu wants to evoke the chaotic beauty and disjunction of the urb an experience. Rather than the clutter of a back alley, however, a stroll down the museum hall resembles a walk along a deserted rural road, where you’re surprised to stumble on a decaying PF Flyer. Here, there’s a small pile of neatly stacked rocks. Down there, a blown tent-like hanging of blue fabric. Over here, a brightly painted metal laundry tree.
But the centerpiece of the installation, a mural on the east wall, is a stunning, multi-layered triumph. Using only espresso-hued contact paper set against the bright white interior wall, the images sit on the surface like shadows. Some – a lone, full tree – are neatly centered between the buttresses. Others spill over edges and corners like they were poured on.
Cucullu occasionally works in monochrome, but here the near-black of his contact paper “ink” suggests the purity of Japanese woodblock or even Rorschach Tests. The architecture of the gallery, which only allows you to back up so far to take in the breadth of the mural, forces you to read it linearly, like the passing scenery on a ship. At the same time, it keeps you in the middle distance, where the impeccable craft of the “cutting” makes the image flutter between photorealist rendering and abstract textures.
Then there are the images themselves, a precise, formally intricate montage (or more accurately, a mass) of images and abstractions, all the more remarkable for being rendered in one color. In one section, the legs of walking figures blend into piles or rock, a giant face, a window grid. It climbs the flat wall, wrapping around the buttress and stretching toward the irregular curves that open into small skylights. Here is an evocation of 21st-century experience – imagery so active and dense that aspires to pure experience rather than careful parsing or deciphering. Distilled to an inkblot essence, the world – experience, history, emotion – is nonetheless forcefully present. On Site: Santiago Cucullu images courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum.
Two trios stepped to the fore during the Milwaukee Ballet’sfinal concert last weekend. One, in Marius Petipa’s “Kingdom of the Shades,” featured “ballerinas” in every sense of the word. Glittering white, posted and impassive, they were blank ideals of form and spirit. The other, in Anthony Tudor’s Offenbach in the Underworld, stepped forward like hookers in a lineup in “he Sopranos.” Costumed in the quaint trappings of a certain kind of Paris café society, they nonetheless slouched, snarled and stared. If they spoke, I’m sure one of them would have sounded like Harvey Keitel: “Whaddya yoo lookin’ at?!”
It was a delicious and, I imagine, delightfully purposeful bit of programming by the ballet’s Artistic Director, Michael Pink. Illustrating just how much ballet has changed in the years between “Shades” (from the 1877 La Bayadere) and Offenbach (1954). The opening of “Shades,” with the 16 members of the corps moving slowly onto the stage, brings you into a meditative, idealized space. There, you are meant to be enraptured by the pure form of the dance. Thursday night, the corps and leads (Tatiana Jouravel and Ryan Martin) did just that.
Offenbach, however, is all about character. There are the usual boy-gets-girl antics, but the joy of the dance is in the personal details. Marc Petrocci and Petr Zahradnicek bounce around the stage as over-eager waiters. Ballet Mistress Nadia Thompson scored some great bits as the madame of the establishment. And Luz San Miguel was a ball of charm and energy as the object of several gentlemen’s affections.
So where did the third piece of the evening, Michael Pink’s Aubade, fall between these two poles? Somewhere in the middle. A dance about two lovers parting at dawn, Pink has it both ways. A couple (Luz San Miguel and Patrick Howell) emerges as the principals in the story. But they also are mixed in to the sets of trios and duets that suggest the varying emotions of their relationship. Always theatrical, Pink sets the dance against a blazing sunrise and evocative fog (crafted by lighting designer Nicholas Phillips).
