Milwaukee Ballet madness at the Pabst

With their white make-up and reddened lips, the 10 dancers in Mauro de Candia’s Purple Fools might be clowns. Or zombies. Or maybe they’re just crazy.

In any case, de Candia’s 27 minutes of madness, premiered Thursday at the Pabst Theater, stands at the top of my list of Weird Things I’ve Seen at the Milwaukee Ballet over the last 30 years. It’s also on my Best-Of list.

Mary Piering dressed the five women in black party dresses with full skirts and the men in disheveled tuxes with old-time stand-up collars. Bare feet on the bottom, powdered hair on top. The women take the old ballet term “bun-head” to extremes. Piering has strapped plainly artificial bun coifs to the tops of the girls’ heads. The buns come loaded with an apparently endless supply of talcum. When they jerk their heads or bat themselves in the bun, clouds of powder waft around them. The guys have the same, but with their own hair.

De Candia asked a lot of these dancers, mentally and physically. They laugh maniacally on cue and stop abruptly as one. They shift from standing starts to mad dashes, often into fast-moving partnering stunts. De Candia inverts traditional vocabulary of ballet relentlessly, and the dancers often snap into their contorted positions without preparation. Tough, grotesque stuff, but the dancers negotiate it skillfully and with a manic intensity that makes it at once breathtaking and hilarious.

The odd assortment of music — Offenbach, Ros, Polley, Vivaldi, Strauss, Mozart, Shostakovich, Bach, Ponchielli, some of it in popsy arrangements — is equally disorienting. The dancing relates to it in various ways, but references to tango keep popping up. Tango can be combat, and it is here. A battle of the sexes swings between cold war and hot war throughout. The women flirt to draw them men in, then punish them for their impertinence in a variety of ways, including kicks in the shins.

Courtney Kramer has the central solo, to the Queen of the Night’s monumental aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. She killed in a dance as dense and wild as the music.

Much of the movement brings to mind a virtuoso take on the Silly Walks of Monty Python days, but this piece moves beyond silly and into the surreal. De Candia shines a light on the odd nature of the whole theatrical enterprise, the strangeness of it, by inverting and exaggerating all manner of theatrical conventions. The closest thing I can think of to it is Fellini’s 8 1/2, in the way it intensifies and exaggerates the “reality” of the stage into a bizarre and comic dream.

This intriguing program also includes premieres by Chicagoan Brock Clawson and MBC’s own Petr Zahradnicek.

• Clawson’s Crossing Ashland, for six couples, contrasts dancers in street clothing with dancers in tight-fitting, taupe leotards or trunks and tops. Pedestrians who cross casually upstage appear downstage as dancers moments later, and vice-versa.  Clawson’s idea is that every anonymous passer-by has a story to tell or a secret life. These stoics in street clothes turn expressive in their dance clothes. They express love, loss, loneliness and conflict in movement.

Clawson’s language is conventional — long lines, a nice flow, steps that surf along the beat of mostly Minimalist music — but nonetheless beautiful and expressive. I like the way the pedestrian and the artistic gradually begin to merge as the piece goes on, to give coherence and a sense of overall progress to a highly episodic work.

The irresistible Nicole Teague opens Zahradnicek’s Autumn Leaves as a bird flitting about a park. Her brilliant smile and avian energy lit up the Pabst. Zahradnicek designed and Teague parsed out wonderful strings of steps that match the rhythms of accompanying bird songs. She flits among a reflective fabric pond, a little pier and a stylized tree. Thanks to Jason Fassl’s clever lighting, the foliage changes to reflect the seasons. Teague, the little bird, has magical powers, over the tree, the seasons, and the young lovers who enter this enchanted scene.

French songs by Gabriel Faure accompany the rest. Pianist Steven Ayers and the Florentine Opera Studio Artists, soprano Erica Schuller, mezzo Kristin DiNinno, tenor Matthew Richardson and especially bass-baritone Dan Richardson sang them very well, from the pit.

Susan Gartell and Rachel Malehorn, naturally elegant in Piering’s lovely shifts in autumnal colors, are hooked up with Alexandre Ferreira and Justin Genna. David Hovhannisyan is the lonesome fifth wheel. The lovers engage in playful, easygoing duets in a sweet pastorale. They run off; Hovhannisyan stays for a swim. Along comes Raven Wales, also lonesome and needing a dip.

Zahradnicek devised a long, complicated, conversational flirtation for them that is fascinating in its subtlety. Teague grows impatient with their progress and arrives with Cupid’s bow. She’s trigger-happy, and that’s funny. A sweet little wedding scene for all follows.

I wish Zahradnicek had stopped there, with the happy ending of a perfect little romantic comedy. But after marriage, birth and death followed, with lots of fitful, body-wrenching angst from widower Hovhanissyan. I understand the choreographer’s desire to add heft, but the arcadian whimsy of the opening doesn’t properly prepare the tragedy to come. Imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream turning into MacBeth somewhere in Act 2.

Sometimes, all really is well that ends well.

The Milwaukee Ballet Company will repeat this program, held at the Pabst Theater, at 7:30 p.m. Friday; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 17-19. For tickets, visit the MBC website or call the company’s ticket line, 414 902-2103. You can see more from the performance and the “Pints Before Pointe” gathering in our slideshow below.