Romance was in the air Thursday night as the Milwaukee Ballet opened its Winter Series at the Pabst Theatre. But it wasn’t your usual St. Valentine’s Day schmaltz. Featuring three world premieres by three choreographers, the program offered very different variations on themes of love and longing.
Petr Zahradnicek’s Autumn Leaves was the most unabashedly romantic. In fact, it was defiantly old-fashioned. A meditation on “seasons and change,” it was like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life, complete with frolicking couples and a Cupid-like nymph/lovebird that oversees the change of seasons and channels the romantic desires. Nicole Teague danced this role with delicacy and charm, and the central couple—David Hovhannisyan and Raven Wales—were fully committed to Zahradnicek’s nostalgiac vision, depicting the evolution of love from liquid-limbed ecstasy to more subdued companionship. Eventually, there is a scene of heart-rending mourning, and Hovhannisyan didn’t hold back. All romantic arcadias, of course, are fleeting.
No problem finding contrast in the other two dances of the evening. Brock Clawson’s Crossing Ashland, was a physically charged and thoroughly modern take on the power of desire, both expressed and repressed. Ashland is, of course, a main thoroughfare in Clawson’s native Chicago. Throughout the piece, dancers in street clothes create the vision of pedestrians passing each other on the street, walking briskly back and forth at the back of the stage. But what happens in the foreground is the real substance of Clawson’s vision, a rollicking and intensely physical roundelay. Stripping down to physique baring costumes, the dancers create striking tableaus and execute some challenging and thrilling moves. There’s also a fair amount of give and take in the couplings, women pushing partners away with a scowl before they move on to someone new. Clawson’s style is charged and physical, but it’s not all about legwork. He creates striking silhouettes with knocked knees and distended shoulders. And his ambitious floor work (though it appeared a bit ragged at times) has fresh takes on his on-the-beat, jazzy style. This is a piece with a wealth of ideas and an animating concept that should find a life with other companies.
There is concept to burn in Mauro de Candia’s Purple Fools, an audacious and rollicking closer that was a clear audience favorite. De Candia showed a bit of his theatrical side in Something I Had in Mind, a ballet-inspired mash-up that won the 2011 Genesis Choreography Competition. His “encore” for the MB was even more outrageous, a pointed and often silly satire that was part “Addams Family,” part Fellini, and part Pina Bausch burlesque (it’s a playful take uber-serious European postmodernism that you’d expect from de Candia, an Italian who has danced with Jiri Kylian, and worked quite a bit in Germany).
The “love” of Purple Fools is appropriately grandiloquent and foolish. Dressed in Cabaret-style black formal wear and white faces, the ten dancers have a Weimar-zombie vibe that’s taken to hilarious extremes when the first soloist whips her head back and a cloud of dust rises from her perfectly coifed bun (the traditional “ballet bun” here becomes monstrous—the women’s identical hair is done up in an ersatz “beehive” that really does look like a hornet’s nest). There is a lot of coupling and uncoupling, with characters emerging (Isaac Sharratt plays a helpless naïf who offers a flower to his beloved—she returns the gesture by hissing at him like Voldemort). Physically over-the-top lifts look inspired from the latest cage-match at WWF Raw. Eventually, chairs on casters are ricocheting around the stage, and general chaos takes over. There isn’t a lot of structure or order in Purple Fools, but it shows signs of a relentless imagination that isn’t afraid to barbecue some sacred cows. And in the ballet world, that’s not a bad thing.
PHOTO: Valerie Harmon and Justin Genna in Purple Fools. Photo by Brian Lipchick
