In the history of classical music, one frequently reads about composers who created their first works when they were children. One usually does not hear that about choreographers.
But when Laura Gorenstein was a child in Whitefish Bay, she created dances for Richards Elementary School’s talent shows, not to mention for her grandparents in the living room.
In fact, she knew practically from her first dance lessons that choreography was “what I wanted to do,” and the language of dance would be “my way to talk to the world.”
Today, Laura Gorenstein Miller, 32, is not only the founder and artistic director of the Los Angeles-based Helios Dance Theater. She also is one of four choreographers chosen in the first Milwaukee International Choreographic Competition to create a new dance work for the Milwaukee Ballet, to be premiered this month.
Moreover, she will return with her company next month to do a three-day residency at Alverno College, culminating in an open-to-the-public performance on April 13. They will present Gorenstein Miller’s first dance composition on a Jewish subject, “About Anne-A Diary in Dance,” built around Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.”
This project is funded in part by grants from the Jewish Community Foundation, the endowment development program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, according to JCF associate executive director Caren Goldberg.
For the Milwaukee Ballet contest, Gorenstein Miller was picked from 137 choreographers from all over the world who submitted videotapes, and she is the only selectee from the United States. The four works will be presented in a program whose overall title is “Genesis.”
MB artistic director Simon Dow chose the four winners. Gorenstein Miller had submitted a tape of “About Anne,” and Dow told The Chronicle in a telephone interview that he found it “clearly a powerful work.”
“I loved the way she incorporated very simple movement and gesture, very every-day life and very human, into the aspects of her movements,” he said. “That was the first thing that galvanized me when I met her work; she knows something about humanity.”
In a recent interview at the Milwaukee Ballet headquarters, Gorenstein Miller said she makes “very personal work,” and the piece she is creating for six dancers from the ballet is an example.
Called “The Quickening,” it will be a meditation on her experience of recently becoming a mother and “trying to balance motherhood and career.” Indeed, she said one of the ways she gets ideas for this piece is to hold her nine-month-old son Max and “dance around the living room.”
“About Anne,” which had its premier about a year ago, may seem to be a more remote subject. Yet Gorenstein Miller said that “being raised Jewish and through my Jewish education [at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun], I had a constant awareness of the Holocaust.” She created this piece in her dance language to do “my part in remembering,” she said.
Gorenstein Miller studied dance all during her childhood in Milwaukee with such local dancers/teachers as Susie Bauer and Pam Kriger. She also studied at the Milwaukee Ballet’s school, but discovered by high school that “classical ballet and I were not a fit.”
She obtained most of her training at the California Institute of the Arts, where she met her husband, Chris Miller, an animator who has since worked as “story artist” for the hit film “Shrek.” After about four years as a freelance choreographer, she founded Helios in 1996.
The Milwaukee Ballet will perform the “Genesis” program Thursday-Sunday, March 21-24, at the Pabst Theater. Tickets are $76.50 to $11. For more information, call the company, 414-643-7677, or the theater, 414-286-3663.
The Helios Dance Theater will perform “About Anne” on Saturday, April 13, 8 p.m., in Alverno College’s Pittman Theater. Tickets are $20 and $18. For more information, call the Alverno box office, 414-382-6044.
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