Looking Ahead:
Twentieth-Century ballet’s country cousin to George Balanchine, Anthony Tudor spent much of his career associated with the American Ballet Theater, but his love of subtlety and understatement was always quintessentially British. The last Milwaukee Ballet program this year celebrates Tudor’s 100th birthday with a revival of his Offenbach in the Underworld, a rollicking romp that was first stage in the mid-1950s. While not the best of Tudor’s work, it’s a great example of his mastery of character and psychology. Each figure in the dance is a recognizable type, but Tudor’s comic timing and way with details makes them fresh. Perhaps Balanchine made ballet “new” for the 20th century, but Tudor made it subtle and psychologically nuanced. The program also features a new work by Artistic Director Michael Pink, and Petipa’s “The Kingdom of the Shades,” a landmark section of La Bayadere.
If the “good old days” of music make you think of vinyl LP’s and MTV veejays, then you should meet Joan Parsley. A scholar and advocate of early music, Parsley and her group, Musical Offering, Ltd., host intimate chamber music concerts featuring period instruments, original performance practices, and original “audience practices,” as well. Forget about the stage, in Parsley’s world, the audience is seated around the players, as if in a drawing room or salon. The Mirabel String Quartet, originally scheduled to present an all Haydn program, had to cancel because of illness. But Parsley has promised a concert of classics (including Papa Haydn) to fill the bill. The Saturday performance at the Wisconsin Conservatory has been canceled, but you can still attend the Sunday concert at Parsley’s Wauwatosa home.
It seems that Parsley’s soiree is only one of many concerts out west this weekend. Also on Sunday, you can choose from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, featuring the Concord Chamber Orchestra and the Master Singers of Milwaukee; the Bel Canto Chorus features an Aaron Copland-Franz Josef Haydn double feature; and Frank Almond’s Frankly Music group presents a Monday evening of Mendelssohn with a few internationally famous guest stars.
British Bad Boy Joe Orton is at his baddest in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the play that first garnered him attention in London. Its reception was mixed, but it thrilled playwright Terrence Rattigan, who put up 3,000 pounds of personal money to move the play to the West End. While other plays and movies have pushed the propriety envelope further since it was written in the mid-1960s, it still delivers some bite, and is a perfect vehicle for the ever-fearless Dale Gutzman. The show closes the season at Gutzman’s Off the Wall Theatre. Karl Miller and Shannon Sloane Spice (no relation) star.
Looking Back:
Hear Me Roar
Built around polemical feminist poetry by Marge Piercy, Elizabeth Johnson’s new piece for her group, Your Mother Dances, is perhaps her boldest political statement yet. But it’s far from the hammerhead diatribe that it could be. In “Constructed Woman Up Above (Ode for a Dakini),” Johnson does just what a choreographer should do with a written text – take it beyond the limits of language and show the complicated way the ideas exist in real life.
Piercy’s poems (spoken by the dancers as they perform) are vivid description of the psychological havoc culture has wreaked on women over the centuries. Lingering over the costume of an 18th century Lady (“Here is a woman forced into shape/rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh:/a woman made of pain”) or likening the image of modern woman to a sports sedan (“She is retooled, refitted and redesigned/every decade”), the words are strong and a bit monolithic. But Johnson’s dance complicates as much as illustrates them. You can see the controlling force in much of the dance – Coppelia-like movement in which the dancers move like marionettes. But there’s also a tension as the dancers are at war with these structures, and often break out into sweeping, dynamic gestures that seem to burst from the very center of their soul. It’s culture against spirit; puppet against human being.
Throughout the piece, Johnson’s gestures range from mimed to abstract. There’s a puppy-dog rollover move that is both cute and embarrassingly submissive, and a duet sequence in which an intimate, connected moment is slapped away by one of the parties – a stinging rejection. The dance builds so that each element is experienced and felt as a discreet gesture. Then, in a rollicking finale, a series of featured solos builds into a piece of thrilling visual music that suggests the complexity of true lived experience.
The rest of the 70-minute program offered echoes of the same theme. Sara Hook’s “Valeska’s Vitriol” (danced by Anna Sapozhnikov) paid tribute to the Valeska Gert, the famed cabaret coquette from Weimar Germany, and ricocheted frenetically between woman as girl-child and whore. “Sweetie Pie,” choreographed and performed by Erika Randall and Sapozhnikov, found the inner Liza (with a “Z”) of demure housewives. And Randall’s “Self Defense” was a brutally physical clash of signifiers – whack-the-floor dancing, cocktail dress and pearls, plastic dog collar cone (the kind that keeps Spot from licking its wounds).
As always, Johnson included duets with her husband, Luc Vanier. “Take my Box” was a quartet for two dancers and two Kleenex boxes, a warts-and-all portrait of relationships where sex and tears are inextricably linked. For contrast, there was “Remind Me,” a swooning take on Fred-and-Ginger-style romance with a contemporary, erotic bite.
Photo by Rick Brodzeller.
There’s Always Room for Cello
On Friday morning, Andreas Delfs got swept away by the ebullient spirit of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, while skirting by some of the particulars. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra was obviously in familiar territory, and responded well in the first movement, one of the most joyous in all of Beethoven. Delfs was at his hyperactive best, at times ignoring the baton beat for several bars to focus on a particular dramatic gesture. Delfs took the final Allegro Con Brio at a breakneck pace, which left some of the details in the rapid string passages in a cloud of furious bowing.
Joseph Johnson’s reading of the Saint-Saens Cello Concerto No. 1 was by contrast expressively economical. The MSO’s Principal Cellist phrased the piece impeccably, and displayed turn-on-a-dime sensitivity in the several of the piece’s shifts in mood and tempo (the piece is in a single movement). After the first section, dominated by a long and intricate falling melody, Johnson’s lovely reading of a slow, legato transition had the kind of hold-your-breath quality for which lyric writing strives. Even with the relatively small ensemble, there were moments when the orchestra overwhelmed the soloist. But the minuet, which winds the cello around delicate waltzing strings, was the sweetest moment of the concert, with perfect balance between the soloist and ensemble.
The concert opener, the Third Symphony of Roy Harris, was almost an afterthought. While one might think a romantic like Delfs would bring some dynamic shape to Harris’ long, ambling lines, the orchestra seemed to move through them without purpose. In the first section, the winds sounded muddy. While the ensemble captured the lovely textures of the second section and there was some excitement in the brass tutti that brought on the final movement, it seemed, for the most part, a de facto glance in the direction of mid-century American modernism.
