Milwaukee Ballet presents Michael Pink’s ‘Dracula’

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Photo by Kim Kenney

When, at age 14, Timothy O’Donnell saw Michael Pink’s Dracula in Melbourne, Australia, he abandoned his plan to become a musical theater star and entered ballet school. His mother, a dance teacher, had taken him to many ballets. “But they were all, you know, ballets,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Then Dracula happened. It changed my view of what this career could be and what the potential of this really was.” He went on to win high praise as a dancer and choreographer in Melbourne. Remembering the choreographer who’d set him on his path, he entered and won Milwaukee Ballet’s international choreographic competition in 2009. In 2012, he joined the company to have Pink close.

Milwaukee Ballet will open its season with Dracula at the Marcus Center on Oct. 22-25. O’Donnell will dance the role of Jonathan Harker on Friday and Sunday. Deeply faithful to Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, Dracula includes a pas de deux for Harker and Dracula in which the former falls helplessly beneath the spell of the later. It’s one of a feast of luscious episodes in this unforgettably Dionysian ballet. “When I first saw the show,” O’Donnell said, “I was coming to terms with my sexuality. Suddenly Harker and Dracula are doing this masculine pas de deux. I hadn’t even considered that two men could do such amazing dancing together. And now I’m here, 16 years later, doing that actual dance.” Alexandre Ferreira is his Dracula.

Davit Hovhannisyan will play the Count for the third time on Thursday and Saturday with Patrick Howell as Harker, Susan Gartell as Mina and Luz San Miguel as Lucy. On Friday and Sunday, Nicole Teague is Mina and Annia Hidalgo is Lucy. Marc Petrocci opens the run as Renfield and Garrett Glassman closes it.

Like O’Donnell, Michael Pink planned to act in musicals when he grew up. To that end, he took dance classes at the Royal Ballet School. At 14, he won the school’s choreographic competition. “So the powers that be at the school decided I was going to be a choreographer,” he said. “The problem was I hadn’t decided to be a choreographer. I entered the competition just for the experience. To this very day I say, ‘Really? This is not what I set out to do!’”

Among those powers that be was Frederick Ashton who is universally ranked among the greatest ballet choreographers. The competition carried Ashton’s name and the great man was a judge. One story of Pink’s subsequent working relationship with “grandma Freddy” ends with young Michael spilling a glass of brandy on the Princess Royal when Ashton, holding his arm, introduced him to her at a performance they’d co-choreographed for the Royal Society of Arts.

“In some respects, I was his protégé,” Pink says. “Because of his Enigma Variations and A Month in the Country, I became interested in narrative dance. Those two pieces are like vignette studies of a social situation. He really presented the characters clearly defined in movement.”

Pink also worked closely with Rudolf Nureyev whose international superstardom anticipated that of The Beatles. Nureyev devised choreography on Pink, had him stage parts of Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet, and demanded that he dance opposite him in a film about Nijinsky, later scrapped when Nureyev fought with the producers.

But then Pink quit ballet completely. He decided it was shallow nonsense, packed his bags and left in the middle of a tour. He followed his musical theater dream briefly, got cast in West Side Story and was offered a role in The Mikado in Ireland. Luckily for artists like O’Donnell and the current Milwaukee Ballet company, and for audience members like me who’ve taken such pleasure in his work, Pink’s friend Christopher Gable was appointed artistic director of England’s Northern Ballet Theatre. Gable invited Pink to make a ballet that felt worthwhile and right to him. Gable helped him to form an extraordinary team that included composer Philip Feeney and designer Lez Brotherson. The result was Dracula.

“When I say, part jokingly, that I’m not a great lover of ballet, I mean it,” Pink told me. “I admire it and I can do it but I can see through it now to the point where I just can’t watch some of it. The defining moments for me, of seeing great dancers onstage and working with them—Nureyev, Fonteyn, Makarova, Baryshnikov—that difference is deep in my heart. That’s real. And I encourage my guys here to have that same artistic integrity, to never underestimate the audience or the value of the material, to respect their bodies, their fellow dancers and the collaborative effort, to be 100% emotionally engaged, to stop worrying about themselves and their double pirouettes and get involved instead in what makes their performances real.”

The show runs Oct. 22-24 at 7:30 p.m. and Oct. 25 at 1:30 p.m. at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 929 N. Water St. For tickets call 414-902-2103 or visit milwaukeeballet.org.