The Nutcracker, the Milwaukee Ballet, and Michael Pink

The Milwaukee Ballet will open Michael Pink’s The Nutcracker Friday (Dec. 10). Usually I’d be fishing for yet another angle on yet another Nutcracker. Instead, let’s just say that Pink’s holiday staple is brilliant and warm, indispensable to the season and his greatest choreographic gift to Milwaukee.

This year, I have something else to write about.

The company and Pink have agreed on a new five-year contract. Pink became artistic director in 2002, when Simon Dow bolted for Australia after a few years here. If he stays through the new contract, Pink would become the longest-serving AD in MBC’s 40-year history.

This news pleased me greatly as a dance fan, even though — Nutcracker aside — I am not a an admirer of Michael Pink’s choreography. He leans toward big, complicated, emotional story ballets that strike me as the dance equivalent of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s poperas. I found Giselle 1943, Romeo and Juliet, the recent Esmeralda manipulative as theater and awkward as dance. Even the ones that work as theater — Dracula and, especially, Peter Pan — don’t speak to me aesthetically. I enjoy them to a certain extent, I admire their craft, and I certainly appreciate their financial importance to the company. But my ballet interests lie elsewhere.

Still, I believe Michael Pink to be the best artistic director the Milwaukee Ballet has had during my nearly three decades in Milwaukee, and probably ever. That thought occurred to me as I interviewed Pink in October, before the company put on his Esmeralda. He knew I disliked Esmeralda and I knew that he knew, but Pink is not the type to take it personally. We started with that ballet but veered off into a broad and fascinating (to me, at least) discussion of ballet’s place in the world and in Milwaukee.

Choreography is not the artistic director’s only job or even his main job. Pink’s primary task is to devise a practical and ever-evolving vision that will make the Milwaukee Ballet viable and relevant within Milwaukee’s cultural ecology. I can define that task because Pink spelled it out for me in so many words in our conversation that day. He is the first artistic director I’ve known to speak of it in such clear, realistic terms.

Every other MBC AD groused about not having enough money, not having enough dancers, not being able to afford good enough dancers, not being understood by the public, about not being American Ballet Theater, about not being in New York and on and on. To all of them, the job was a disappointment, a holding action against dissolution. Pink does not see it that way, and that sets him apart.

I was skeptical, back in 2003, when he began to dismantle a company built around Amy Fote, who had evolved from local kid to brilliant talent to world-class ballerina, and to a lesser extent around the fiery Yumelia Garcia. Fote left and became a big star with the Houston Ballet, and I missed her a great deal. But Pink was right; the Milwaukee Ballet could not go on as Snow White and the Dwarves. That’s not entirely fair — the company had some good dancers — and those are my words, not Pink’s. But the fact is, a huge gap in talent, presence and technique yawned between the top dancers and the bottom ones in the company Pink inherited.

Pink’s company today does not have a ballerina in Fote’s class, but it is much stronger top to bottom and has much better men. Pink has assembled a lean, eager, versatile troupe that brings collective strength and musicality to every step. The company doesn’t do the big classics that were its staples for many years. Pink doesn’t see the point in staging an underpopulated, conventional Swan Lake, for example. But these dancers can show fine classical style when they need to and they are brilliant with challenging modern work. They kill in the likes of Mark Godden’s Magic Flute, Val Caniparoli’s Gustav’s Rooster and Trey McIntyre’s The Reassuring Effects of Form and Poetry.

Which brings me back to choreography. Pink does not seek out like-minded dancemakers to fill out his season. He’s brought plenty of adventurous, smart work to town — enough to keep me interested.

None of Pink’s predecessors had his broad understanding of the market. The rest saw the other arts institutions around town as eating from the same pie and jealously guarded MBC’s slice. Pink has gone out of his way to reach out, and finally hit paydirt in a big way this fall. He choreographed Cabaret! for director Mark Clements at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. The show was a smash-hit debut for Clements, a ground-breaking collaboration that got everyone’s attention, and a choreographic win for Pink. That show will make a difference in Milwaukee for years to come.

On top of everything else, Pink is a smart, charming man with a great head for business. He’s just the guy you can trot out for potential donors and business partners, and not merely for cosmetic reasons. He gets the money game. He and executive director Dennis Buehler, a bright light himself, are very much on the same page. Together, they give the Milwaukee Ballet the best 1-2 punch of any arts group in town. Their ingenuity and drive are behind The Harmony Initiative, a galvanizing idea for partnerships with UWM’s dance department and sports medicine clinics associated with Froedert Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin. They will likely all cohabit the same building Downtown — which will also house the 300-seat dance theater Milwaukee has always needed. If they can pull this thing off — and I think they will – The Harmony Initiative will be one of the great accomplishments in Milwaukee cultural history, on a par with the building of the Milwaukee Rep’s complex.

The first time I walked into Michael Pink’s office, in 2002, I noticed a little placard tacked to the wall. It read: Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. Pink has lived by that, and he and Buehler are making big things happen, right here.

When you go to The Nutcracker this holiday season — and really, you ought to, it’s great — put a little extra into the applause when Michael Pink comes on for his customary brief and witty curtain speech.  Let him know that you know we’re lucky to have him for another five years.

Click here for the full schedule of The Nutcracker run, Dec. 10-26, at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall. Call 414-902-2103 for tickets