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Stuck on stage
Theater with people skipping, not genuine dance, in Michael Pink’s ‘Dracula’
By Diego Costa
The same spectacle-obsessed malady of Hollywood cinema: let’s dazzle the eye to the detriment of the mind.
A recurring mistake the Milwaukee Ballet seems unable to avoid is thinking that ballet can be theater. Or that dance, in order to tell a story, needs to tell it via the same language that more narrative-oriented art forms do: theatrically.
Except that ballet is ballet, not theater. And part of its beauty is the fact that it can tell stories or trigger ethereal experience according to its own nature: body movement, freed from any formulaic narrative structures borrowed from stage dramas.
Instead of loosely basing a dance piece on its storyline, Michael Pink’s “Dracula,” which ran at the Marcus Center through Oct. 30, held on to overtly narrative specificities that stalled its potential marvels.
In lieu of trusting the language of dance, the communicative capacity of the body alone, “Dracula” insisted on trying to tell its story with overacted body language and exaggerated mis-en-scène bordering melodrama.
The power of ballet lies in the opposite of all those Sicilian sign language theatrics, the minutia of body moving in space, the subtlety of corporeal control and interaction. All of that gets overburdened by the desperate need to get Dracula’s saga communicated at any price: chronologically and even with actual voice dialogue.
For all of its obviousness, “Dracula” represented the core picture of the state of American art today: overproduced sets, exhibitionistic lighting, a grandiose soundtrack and numbingly inauthentic substance.
This ballet piece suffered from the same spectacle-obsessed malady of Hollywood cinema: let’s dazzle the eye to the detriment of the mind. And while all of this million-dollar-looking extravaganza may have given the audience aesthetic pleasure, it offered nothing new.
“Dracula” could have been much more dazzling if it had dared to forget the confinement of the physicality of its space (the stage) and attempted to reach more cinematic realms. It would have felt more pertinent and progressive had it recognized the power of its story but translated it to its bodies, unafraid of what would be lost in translation.
But with the inert qualities that a filmed theater play on TV evokes, “Dracula” never felt confident of its own language. It never created one. It simply added heterogenic elements of theater and dance to the same stage without aiming for the Eisensteinian third meaning.
That lack of commitment to experimenting, to setting itself free from confining artistic paradigms seems to be a habitual symptom for the Milwaukee Ballet.
The company does have to deal with the limiting Milwaukee dance public: a mostly elite audience of older, white people who may be resistant to unfamiliar languages.
But if respecting the audience’s comfort zone was an honest approach to art-making, we would still be storming out of movie theaters when a train moved in our direction on the silver screen.
The company’s upcoming show, Pink’s “The Nutcracker,” opens Dec. 16.
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