Thinkstock / Getty Images
“Ever since I can remember, I was dancing,” says Milwaukee Ballet’s Luz San Miguel. “My parents owned a restaurant in Madrid. I danced on the tables. My mother would pull me back into the kitchen. There was a ballet school close by. My parents finally put me in ballet class but that didn’t stop me dancing on the tables.”
From Spain, San Miguel received a scholarship to train in Antwerp. She took professional work in Dresden and Leipzig where she fell in love with Michael Pink’s ballet Dracula ; so much so that she applied to England’s Northern Ballet Theater where Dracula was born so she could work with Pink. The English offered her a job but she turned it down when she discovered Pink had left.
She arrived in the States with dancer Ryan Martin in 2000, worked with Tulsa Ballet, Charleston Ballet Theater and BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio. There she learned that Pink was in Milwaukee. She sent an audition tape and was told that the company had no openings. A year later, she received an invitation to audition. In 2005, she danced her first Milwaukee Ballet role. It was Lucy in Dracula .
If one can name a female star at Milwaukee Ballet, it’s San Miguel. “Everybody brings something and we are all a family,” she says. Still, her 10 years of experience working in this company’s style, her mastery of ballet technique and her uncanny transformational ability when creating characters in story ballets fundamental to the artistry of Artistic Director Michael Pink have placed her at the heart of many productions. Partly to honor their now decade-long collaboration, Pink is reviving his staging of Giselle, the quintessential Romantic ballet, with San Miguel in the title role, one of the most challenging in the repertory. Annia Hidalgo, a relative newcomer in her fourth season with Milwaukee Ballet, will perform the role at the Friday and Sunday performances.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Premiered in Paris in 1841, Giselle is the tale of a peasant girl wooed by an aristocrat in peasant disguise. She falls hard before learning that Albrecht is betrothed to a girl from his own class. Giselle goes mad and, in that state, suffers heart failure. In the second act, a guilt-riddled Albrecht visits her grave where he’s attacked by the wilis, the ghosts of girls who died after being jilted by their lovers. Wilis haunt graveyards and drive male visitors to dance themselves to death. Giselle is welcomed to their vengeful ranks; but she forgives Albrecht, saves his life and earns eternal rest.
Premiered at England’s Northern Ballet Theater in 1996, Pink’s radical reimagining preserves most of the traditional choreography while transferring the story to a European ghetto during World War II. Albrecht is a member of the invading military disguised as a local. Learning her beloved’s true identity, Giselle “goes cuckoo,” as San Miguel puts it, and dies. Instead of wilis danced by white-clad ballerinas, the entire ghetto community, male and female, rises from the mass grave to which their bodies were committed by the occupying force. Giselle is among them, condemned to seek revenge eternally. As in the original, Albrecht comes to grieve his crime. Giselle forgives him, freeing herself. His life is spared but, as Pink says, “He has to live with what he’s done.”
The uniforms are nondescript, onstage texts are in made-up language, but audiences see Giselle’s community as Jews and Albrecht as a Nazi. “We aren’t saying,” Pink explains, “that groups like the Nazis, or ISIS today, should be forgiven their crimes—those are inexcusable—but on a personal level, forgiveness is possible.”
Jody Hirsh, the Jewish Community Center’s Judaic education director, helped the dancers understand ghetto life in Warsaw in the 1940s. James Zeger of Carroll University’s theater faculty helped them develop realistic characterizations. Historically, that community was alive with music and dance, so Pink puts some of the accompanying Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra players onstage as part of Giselle’s community. The dancers sing with them.
Pink has kept the first act choreography traditional; likewise, Giselle’s and Albrecht’s second act dances. The choreography for the avenging spirits is Pink’s and has a modern cast. The production aroused some controversy in Milwaukee when Pink staged it shortly after his arrival here more than a decade ago. “It was too soon,” he says. “Some only wanted to see a traditional Giselle . Now our audience wants to be challenged.”
San Miguel praises Pink for giving his female characters “strong ovaries.” In rehearsal with Davit Hovhannisyan, her onstage partner for 10 years, you see them both work to master not only the beautiful, difficult steps, but the truth behind them. “I always knew there was something else in ballet,” San Miguel says. “With Michael, I found it. I found my home and my artistic home here. I became the artist I was meant to be.”
Performances are 7:30 p.m., March 26-28 and 1:30 p.m., March 29 at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 929 N. Water St. Call 414-902-2103 or visit milwaukeeballet.org.
