Is the Milwaukee Ballet’s Genesis competition a snapshot of the international ballet scene? It presents three young choreographers chosen from an international roster, and turns them loose on eight accomplished dancers. To judge from this weekend’s show at the Pabst Theater – a flu bug kept me from seeing them until Sunday afternoon, the last of six performances – there’s plenty of invention to go around. But not all of it was satisfying.
In Lucas Jervies Smile, I had a hard time getting past the clown (even though it was played by the charming Petr Zahradnicek). A little Jean-Louis Barrault and a lot of Chaplin, this tramp in white unfortunately had a tendency to erupt into peels of mad laughter, giving the piece the tone of a nightmare montage from a subpar episode of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s too bad, because Jervies crafts exciting and lively gesture, particularly in the way he sends partnering arms this way and that. And in the very physical moves he designed for David Hovhannisyan, who has never looked better.
Edgar Zendejas’s Mara uses the stage in interesting ways, basing the dance’s architecture around a rectangle of light that divides the floor into light and dark (all the excellent lighting in the concert was by Jason Fassl), and allows his dancers to move between the shifting spaces. But some of Zendajas’s ideas just don’t fly, like the extended duet for two men in which one partner held the head of the other like a basketball throughout the twists and turns. And when the stage transforms into what seemed like a French Riviera disco, the movement itself seemed to deteriorate to meandering jazz fluff.
Judging from the choreographer’s statements in the program, these are artists with an impulse for big ideas, or at least ideas that are not simply about bodies in motion. What I missed most was a sense of structure, which is perhaps why my favorite dance was Something I Had in Mind, by Mauro de Candia, which makes chaos a sort of organizing principal. Candia’s dancers – the women in tutus – move suddenly and often hilariously between the traditional and the outrageous. An elegant pose collapses into a subhuman, Smeagol-like crawl. Or a gloriously arced lift comes to earth with a twitchy hand flutter. Candia loves exploring juxtapositions of harsh angles and elegant lines, and does so by creating characters that are like Coppelia dolls thrust into a Jello-wrestling pit. I’m not completely sold on the way Candia wrapped up the piece – with Joshua Reynolds in a solo spotlight, as if it was all a confused dream – but the bally innovation throughout the dance sold me. This is a choreographer to watch.
Photo Credit: Jessica Kaminski
