Ballet presents Innovative Motion

The Milwaukee Ballet will present Innovative Motion at the Pabst Theater from Thursday, Feb. 11 through Sunday, Feb. 14. The works featured in Innovative Motion are new to Milwaukee Ballet’s repertoire and two are original pieces. The guest choreographers working with the Company reinforce Milwaukee Ballet’s dedication to debuting innovative pieces.
“This is the life-blood of dance,” said Michael Pink, artistic director. “It’s extremely important to generate new work. It’s interesting, vital to the development of our artists, and critical to continuing our effort to reach new generations of ballet-goers.”
Salvatore Aiello’s Clowns and Others features vignettes of 10 clowns portraying human traits such as compassion, grief and wonder, set to live accompaniment of Sergei Prokofiev’s humorous piano score. Luc Vanier’s world premiere, Sur_Rendered, continues the collaboration between the UW-Milwaukee (UWM) and Milwaukee Ballet through a unique blend of movement and visual imagery. Vanier, an assistant professor at UWM’s Peck School of The Arts, has used motion capture technology as a way to link animation in real time for the stage. Motion capture technology refers to the process of recording movement and translating that movement onto a digital model.
The winner of Milwaukee Ballet’s 2009 international choreographic competition, Timothy O’Donnell, will return to Milwaukee with another world premiere, Bolero, Let There Be Light. Set to Ravel’s “Boléro” and sound bytes from historical speeches, O’Donnell’s ballet is a series of questions, the main one being, “Will we continue to take authority as the truth, or will we start taking truth as the authority?”
Tickets are available for $25 to $88. To order or for additional information, call (414) 902-2103 or visit www.milwaukeeballet.org.
Audiences are also invited to attend the Milwaukee Ballet’s Pints before Pointes event on Thursday, Feb. 11 in the Salon at the Intercontinental Hotel, 139 E. Kilbourn Ave. at 6 p.m. A cash bar and complimentary appetizers will be available and the cost to attend is $35 which includes a prime seating ticket to the performance following the event.