Ballet dancers don’t just have to step and leap gracefully. They also have to tell stories, portray characters, express emotions and communicate ideas — and do so without words, but with gestures and facial expressions. And they can’t do that without having minds as well-trained as their bodies.
Which is why members of the Milwaukee Ballet last month listened intently to Amy Shapiro, professor of philosophy at Alverno College, as she discussed the history of the Holocaust and of ghettos, and the perspectives of both victims and perpetrators.
“My goal,” said Shapiro, who also is director of the Holocaust Education and Resource Center of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, “was to set a context for them so they would understand the extreme circumstances in which people lived in ghettos.”
The dancers learned from Shapiro as preparation for their performances this week of “Giselle 1943,” the ballet that company artistic director Michael Pink originally created in England in 1997.
In this work, Pink and his collaborators attempted to modernize what is considered a supreme classic Romantic ballet. The original “Giselle,” created in the 1840s, tells a dream-like story about a young peasant woman in love with a disguised nobleman, with tragic results; she dies and returns as a spirit.
The new version, running March 18-21, is set during World War II but uses the original music. Giselle is a young woman belonging to a group of people imprisoned in a ghetto; and her lover is a disguised officer from the occupying forces.
While this scenario suggests Jews and German Nazis, Pink said in a telephone interview that the identities of oppressed and oppressors are deliberately made more vague in the ballet.
In doing research in 1997, Pink spoke to members of the British Jewish community, including Holocaust survivors. “You do open up too many vivid memories” in trying to portray what happened with accuracy, he said.
“Out of respect for the memories and people’s thoughts and feelings, we felt no need to be that specific” in identifying the oppressed and oppressors in the new ballet, he said.
Moreover, the ballet embodies a “universal theme” and a “timeless topic” that has “been around as long as mankind was on the planet — vying for power and eliminating opposition,” he said.
And by giving the classical story a new and more modern setting, Pink is striving to “bring it closer to the audiences today and to future audiences,” he said. Such audiences that are not accustomed to classical ballet “may find this more accessible and may become inquisitive to see the original,” he said.
Even so, Pink felt that the Milwaukee dancers needed to learn what Jewish people in Nazi ghettos endured and felt, to provide the dancers with “a bed of information” from which to build their characters.
Therefore, the company brought in Shapiro. And apparently, her presentation helped.
Principal dancer Yumelia Garcia, who will portray Giselle in the Friday and Saturday evening performances, said Shapiro “made us understand the feelings of the people that went through this hard time” and helped the dancers “put ourselves in the situation.”
Shapiro said she had seen a version of “Giselle 1943” in Europe and is “really kind of impressed” with the work.
“Ballet is usually so much fluff,” she said, but here “I think Michael is trying to make the audience think, mostly about issues of power and control” and “about how people are oppressed, how people oppress and what kinds of redemption there are.”
“And I think the effort should be applauded,” she continued, “because he’s willing to take the risks involved to bring ballet to a more profound level, or to a level it is capable of reaching.”
Tickets for the remaining performances start at $18. For more information, contact the ballet, 414-643-7677 or www.milwaukeeballet.org .
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