Double Dance Performance Power Comes to Overture Hall

LINES Ballet dancer Meredith Webster, center, with Hubbard Street Dance
Chicago and Alonzo King LINES Ballet in Azimuth. Amber Bliss photo.

by Susan Kepecs

Established, highly successful dance companies don’t combine as a matter of course. I can’t rememver ever seeing two troupes merge in a single work.  But on March 20, in Overture Hall, two very different organizations – the San Francisco-based Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago – perform separately and then come together in a brand-new work choreographed by King. 

   The sheer logistics of this temporary merging seem almost impossible. Both companies are multicultural and beautifully trained, but the similarities end there.  Hubbard Street, which performs in Madison almost annually, is a contemporary repertory company known for clever, accessible works built on the technical triumvirate of ballet, jazz and “modern” plus a slick, Euro-chic aesthetic obtained via the company’s deep ties with Nederlands Dans Theater. Former Hubbard Street artistic director Jim Vincent left Chicago for NDT in 2009 (though he’s since moved on); Hubbard’s current leader, Glenn Edgerton, also has long-term NDT links, and Hubbard’s resident choreographer, Alejandro Cerrudo, from Spain, is a Nederlands alum.  

   LINES, which appeared at the Wisconsin Union Theater twice, in 2005 and again in 2010, is simply the unique artistic vision of Alonzo King, whose artifice-free ballets – compositions of cosmic geometry at once more ancient than Europe and newer than today – are like images from the mind’s eye of a Zen master, framed in the tangled roots of western classical dance. In order to carry off King’s conceptions, his post-neoclassical ballet dancers possess an elastic vocabulary that subsumes the sum of human possibility without sacrificing perfection of line, form and flow.

The program consists of three substantive pieces, which, taken together, allow the audience see what each company is made of and then to ponder the mysterious amalgam that is “Azimuth,” choreographed by King.

   King’s “Rasa” (2007), which opens the evening, was chosen, I suppose, because it’s a LINES signature piece that’s toured the globe.  It features a score by Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain, with whom King has collaborated several times.  The dance is built of shifting pas de deux and ensemble movements that condense in the interplay of light, rhythmic energies and the astonishing physicality of LINES’ dancers.

   Representing Hubbard Street is Cerrudo’s “Little Mortal Jump” (2012). “It’s one of Alejandro’s latest works,” Edgerton says.  “I feel it represents where he is with his choreography right now.  I chose him because he’s our resident choreographer, and “Little Mortal Jump” was made on the current company, so it also represents where all of us are right now.  It’s a wonderful piece, entertaining but thought-provoking.  It’s lighthearted but it turns substantial at the end, with the last duet.  It’s a series of vignettes – there’s no story to it, but there’s a trajectory.  Without being literal it takes you on an emotional path. It has incredible stage theatrics, and the music’s very powerful and dramatic, especially at the end. The work leaves you with this really great feeling. 

   “It’s a fantastic program,” Edgerton continues. “’Rasa’ and ‘Little Mortal Jump’ are vastly different, and then in ‘Azimuth’ [which features all twelve LINES dancers and sixteen of Hubbard Street’s eighteen] we have both companies together – twenty-eight people onstage.  It’s very powerful, how all these artists with very different backgrounds intermingle.”

   The collaboration came about, Edgerton says, because he was at LINES three years ago watching King’s company rehearse.  “I was fascinated with Alonzo’s way of working with dancers –the way he was challenging them – and I wanted my dancers to experience that.  Both companies are classically trained, but they approach that training differently.  I said to Alonzo, ‘our dancers are so vastly different from yours – wouldn’t it be interesting to show that juxtaposition?’  But what we ended up with was showing the likeness instead.  Alonzo made a wonderful work that shows how dance is a universal language; the two companies come together in movement and expression, and it’s very exciting.”  

   It’s not just the finished piece – the whole process was exciting, Edgerton clarifies.  “My dancers loved working with LINES’ dancers, as people and as artists.  I could see it in their faces, but I also heard it directly from them.  I could see how the LINES dancers also were inspired by my dancers – it was a win-win situation all the way, and it was very enriching for all of us to work together.” 

   That said, most of the work took place across 1863 miles, as the crow flies.  “The initial stage involved taking a piece of Alonzo’s into the company,” Edgerton says.  That ballet, “Following the Current Upstream,” originally was created for Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in 2000.

   “We got to live in that piece first,” Edgerton says.  “After we absorbed it [it became part of Hubbard Street’s repertory in 2011], we started working on the collaboration.  Alonzo came to Chicago to work on it, and then we worked on it separately.  Alonzo sent us his notes and we sent our rehearsal comments or questions back – ‘what is the intention of this step or the other?’  We also worked back and forth via video, so we were well set up to fit the two companies together in a very short time – though of course there was a great deal of trust and understanding involved all along.” 

   After a year of this long-distance affair the two companies met at UC Irvine late last summer.  “We engaged an old colleague of mine there, Jodie Gates, because we’d agreed that we should work on neutral territory so one company didn’t feel like the other’s guest – and we thought a university dance program would be interested in watching Alonzo create a new work, and in having students watch the process of two companies coming together unfold,” Edgerton says.  “It all worked out beautifully.  And then we reconvened in January, a few days before the premiere [at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, on Feb. 1].” 

   It’s worth noting that this program is only slated for four cities – after Berkeley it goes to Chicago’s Harris Theater (Mar. 14-17), and after the Madison performance it makes one last stop in Los Angeles, in June.

Despite the short time the companies spent together, “Azimuth” has beauty and power, King told me after the Berkeley premiere. 

   Azimuth is a perfect Alonzo King concept.  In astronomy, the azimuth is the angle of a celestial object along the arc of the observer’s horizon measured from a fixed point, usually north; for example, due north has an azimuth of 0, and due east’s is 90 degrees. But since King’s cosmic geometry isn’t literal, I asked what azimuth means to him, and what he did with the idea in this dance.

   “For me,” he says, “where a person stands is the axis mundi. Where you are as you stand on this sphere in space – and where you fix your attention – that’s azimuth.  Where you’re standing and where your attention is are separated by distance.  Art or love eradicates subject and object – when two become one, time and distance are anihilated because of absorption.  The aspiration of a fixed figure at any point on earth is usually a diagonal, reaching up.  How do you combine heaven and earth, bring willpower and goal and desire into one spot?  The idea of the word ‘heaven’ is a trigger.  People think of an old white man in the sky. But heaven is what your joy is.  Humans want to avoid pain and suffering – to find joy that doesn’t go stale.  Our choices are based on those things.  Everyone has some dream or is in love with something and with that you want union, you want to get rid of separation.  I love you – that’s a separation.  Lao Tse says that the painter has to become the horse before he paints the horse.  That’s what you have to do as a dancer.  You’re inhabiting an idea.  It’s not a step.  If you just do steps you’re frozen, without luminance.  So that’s the point of ‘Azimuth.’”

   Like geometry, music is a key to King’s works.  I’m always reminded of string theory – the idea that everything in the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings, and so, as theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says, “we are nothing but cosmic melodies” played out on the instrument of our bodies.  For “Azimuth,” King chose some original music by Millennial generation Bay Area composer Ben Juodvalkis, and a lot of Russian liturgical chants.  “Those Russians singing liturgical – you don’t hear it that often, and they do it so damn well, with a kind of release and Russian gusto and sincerity – it plugs into all kinds of release-based music.  It’s not about a pretty sound, but a true sound, like the soul is singing.  The Russians are very soulful in that way.  And the technique is faultless.  The source of that sound is a heartspace.  It’s quite moving, and it’s important to put something that’s moving from the heart into the theater – people in the audience are so cerebral and battered by the reality of living life in the world.  You want to embrace, not batter them.  I was just reading an article on Alternet.com.  The writer was bemoaning that art isn’t more political, that apolitical art is meaningless, and I thought – what’s more political than saying ‘you are the answer and you are the problem, and there are states beyond the halloween show of the world.’”

   That’s a revealing statement.  To “get” it – and to get the full impact of King’s ballets – you have to be willing to detach, breathe, and enter that state the mindfulness gurus call open space.  If “Azimuth” turns out to be as effective as King’s works for LINES alone, the energies of 28 highly diverse, exquisitely trained dancers coming together at a fixed point – the Overture Hall stage – should offer plenty to meditate on.

Dracula Lives!

     Smith and ballet mistress Sarah Melli (back, left) watch Tierney and Linzer
   rehearse a pas de deux; Massey's band, in background.    © SKepecs 2013 

by Susan Kepecs

Vampires are coming – grab your garlic, protect your neck!  Madison Ballet premieres it’s all-new production of Dracula this weekend (March 8-10) at Overture’s Capitol Theater.  Artistic director W. Earle Smith’s choreographic take on Bram Stoker’s famous 1897 Victorian Gothic horror story promises to be the wildest, most contemporary ballet this small gem of a company has done in its five short years of existence.

    Over the last couple of decades Dracula’s been adapted by dozens of American ballet companies. One of the most successful versions, in fact, is Michael Pink’s, which has been a big hit for Milwaukee Ballet.  And dance companies often purchase the rights to other choreographers’ works.  Smith recently acquired George Balanchine’s “Valse – Fantasie;” it’s featured in the company’s upcoming repertory program, “Exposed,” which runs April 19-20 at the Bartell.  So why did Smith decide to do yet another Dracula?

    The inspiration to take on Stoker’s spooky story came from Smith's little brother (through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program) Ted, who’s a big fan of the Twilight books.  But Smith’s always been interested in vampires, witches and werewolves, he says.  The idea of doing Dracula was compelling, and other productions didn’t fill the bill.

    “When I wanted to do Midsummer Night’s Dream [last presented in 2011],” Smith says, “I decided against choreographing my own – there were Midsummers out there that I liked that would fit this company.  But I looked at other Draculas.  I liked the choreography in some of them, but what I didn’t like was the music.  It was always classical – either a score from another ballet or a compilation.  The score for one production used the ball scene from Romeo and Juliet.  It’s fabulous music, but I couldn’t get the idea of Romeo and Juliet out of my head.  And most of all I wanted Dracula to be a rock and roll ballet.  I thought about doing a rock compilation, but I was listening to music and fighting preconceived notions about what it meant.  So I decided that for my ballet I needed original rock music.”

    Smith asked Madison composer / keyboardist Michael Massey to write the score.  “Mike and I are friends and we have a close working relationship,” Smith says, “which allowed us to see this project in similar ways. The other thing is that the hardest part of composing a score for a two-hour ballet is to sustain the depth and variety of the music. Mike’s done a beautiful job in creating a work that not only tells the story but that’s interesting musically.  I’ll wake up in the morning and be humming melodies from the show, which tells me it’s good music, it’s memorable and impactful.  At first I considered choosing a composer out of New York or L.A., but the fact that Mike lives here is important.  We’ve been working together on Dracula regularly for over a year and a half, and twice a week for the last four months.  It makes the collaboration fun and lets Mike really bring life to the music.  I’ve been working on the choreography since last September, developing a contemporary vocabulary for this particular ballet, and as I worked on it he’d come in to the studio to watch the excerpts and see where it was going.”

    This close collaboration proved crucial for Smith’s concept. In story ballets achieving balance between dancing and acting can be tricky. Too many productions tip toward theatrics, a criticism that’s not uncommon in reviews of other Dracula productions.  Sometimes, though, the story line’s pared down to almost nothing, erasing the point.  In Smith’s Dracula, the interplay between dance and characterization relies heavily on the score.

    “What I think I’ve been able to do very successfully here is to marry the movement with the theatrical elements that are important in telling the story. I wanted to make this more about the dance than the story, but the score is the key to bringing it all out.  Each character has his or her own sound, so the essence of the protagonists is revealed through the music.  There’s obviously blocking involved to tell the story – Dracula bites Lucy, those kinds of things – but the action’s all related in contemporary ballet movement.”

Massey’s six-piece rock n’ roll band (keyboards, electric violin, two guitars, bass, drum kit) will play live onstage. 

    Like Massey’s score, the production design drives a stake through the hearts of more traditional adaptations.  You won’t find many Draculas, on stage or in film, that don’t cling to Victorian aesthetics. But Smith chose flat-out steampunk style for his sets and costumes instead; the look of his ballet’s rooted in Victorian forms, but it’s sci-fied and punkified to the hilt.

    The choreography’s classic Smith, recalling his earlier repertory works of contemporary tone, like “Night Dances” (2004) and “Expressions” (2011).  But from what I saw in the rehearsal I watched, it’s much bolder and more sophisticated. Some of the pas de deux are dangerously sexy, and Smith, who’s sometimes held back from staging the poppy petit allegros and sweeping grand allegros he gives in class, has gone full-out.

    The cast looks terrific.  Matthew Linzer, who’s danced with Bay-area ballet companies Smuin, Diablo, and Oakland, and whose soloist credits are many, takes the title role in his first Madison Ballet appearance.  Company veteran Jennifer Tierney, who’s been missing in Madison since we last saw her in 2011 as the bride in Midsummer’s wedding grand pas classique, is perfectly cast as the ethereal Mina.  The very solid Brian Roethlisberger is her fiancée, Jonathan Harker.  Marguerite Luksik, whose principal Madison Ballet roles include Midsummer’s Puck and Nutcracker’s Clara-cum-Sugarplum Fairy, is Mina’s Dracula-bitten best friend Lucy.  Long-time company member Jacob Ashley is Dr. Van Helsing, who, being a scientist, knows how to handle vampires. The corps – the rest of the regular company, plus five strong young male dancers imported for this production – looks looks pretty damn good, too, and the corps numbers are dotted with short solos, which lets everyone show off.     

     And Dracula is both dark and fun.  It was still being set when I watched a rehearsal.  Smith and his dancers were going over the scene in which Van Helsing and his friends prepare to capture Lucy, who’s become a vampire, and cut off her head.  Smith worked out an allegro combination full of chugs and failles, sautés and runs, and gave the dancers their motivation: “We got our mission and we’re gonna kick ass!  We’re gonna get that Lucy!  When a vampire comes runnin’ at your face, dude, run!  Don’t just stand there!”

    Waving imaginary weapons, the members of Van Helsing's posse ran.  Everybody laughed. 

A not-quite-set rehearsal’s a long way from a finished production.  I can’t comment on how all the elements work together, or how well the exuberant choreography will fit Capitol Theater’s smallish stage.  But Dracula has the potential to be Smith’s best ballet yet. 
_____________________
If you need a plot refresher, there's one here:  http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/dracula.html
... and if it tickles your fancy, wear your steampunk best to the show!  

Music Review: "The Voice" of Inspiration

                                                       © SKepecs 2013

by Susan Kepecs

Vusi Mahlasela’s concert Friday night, Feb. 15, at the Wisconsin Union Theater at The Sett, Union South, was a golden ode to Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko and legions of other warriors who fought to free South Africa from apartheid.  Mahlasela himself fought in that army –  a humble poet of stripped-down mbaqanga and township jive, he’s called “The Voice” not just because he can sing like gangbusters, but because he gives voice to the movement for peace, freedom and justice in South Africa and around the world, following in the gigantic footsteps of Mama Africa, the late Miriam Makeba, who Mahlasela cites as one of his greatest influences. The ghost of Mama Africa was in the house Friday night, along with the stalwart spirits of other ancestors, both gone and living, who fill out Mahlasela’s musical lineage.  But in a sense they’re our forerunners too, because ultimately we’re all children of Africa.  That’s an empirical fact of human evolution. 

Onstage it was just Mahlasela, a helluva guitarist, on an amped acoustic instrument (which he sometimes danced with as he played), accompanied by a backup guitar player whose name I didn’t catch and who often gazed at Mahlasela in apparent amazement, wielding an electric axe that he sometimes played like a bass, sometimes like a rhythm instrument and occasioualy like a second lead, harmonizing with Mahlasela’s double-thumbed melodies.  Similarly, this second player sometimes sang on the chorus, providing bass counterpoint to Mahlasela’s incredible vocal range that flows from deep tenor to Motown-like falsetto, with an occasional low growl. The resulting, unmistakable township sound was as round and full as the summer sun. 

Its about ubuntu, Mahlasela says of his songs.  “If you don’t know what ubuntu means, Google it!”  But before anybody could whip out an iPhone he went on, defining ubuntu as “the gift of Africa – the gift of everyday kindness, humbleness, tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, redistribution.” 

This hopeful message, like the joyfulness of Mahlasela’s songs, seems poignantly at odds with the reality of today’s South Africa.  It’s been fourteen years since Mandela, now 94, stepped down from his hard-won presidency. Raging inequalities persist, and violent police attacks on striking mine workers echo apartheid-era confrontations.  But the luscious songs Malhasela sings in Zulu and Xhosa (including a couple of “click” songs) – interspersed with stories told in English so we could understand the meaning, if not the content, of the lyrics – should inspire us all to righteous revolution. 

“In 1984, when Dr. Tutu won the Nobel Price,” Mahlasela says, “we were celebrating in Soweto – the United Democratic Front [a student-worker-church alliance closely tied to Mandela’s African National Congress].  I was there. Somebody in the crowd was carying a poster of a face.  It was Zindzi Mandela, one of Nelson’s daughters, who read a letter by Nelson telling us to keep up the struggle.  We found out that what she was carrying was a portrait of Mandela!  We didn’t know how our leaders looked – they’d been imprisoned on Robben Island since before we were born.  It was so exciting to see that picture!  We were shouting ‘¡Viva Nelson Mandela! ¡Viva!’ 

                                                                © SKepecs 2013

And with that, Mahlasela launched into a big, joyful, grinning song for Mandela, head tossed back, fist raised in revolutionary salute.  I was dying to stand up, raise my own fist, and dance.  I’m sure others in the audience were, too, but Mahlasela commanded so much respect that nobody did.

Among Mahlasela’s other ubuntu tunes Friday night were “Sing, Sing Africa,” the ITV theme song during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa; “Say Africa,” the title cut off his latest CD, produced by Taj Mahal (ATO Records, 2011); the lovely “Woza,” a love song, also from Say Africa – classic township jive, smooth as silk, sweet as honey, edged with a smidge of soaring falsetto.

And “Thula Mama,” a song “to all the women in South Africa, and especially to my late grandmother who protected me as a young activist from the police.”

“I was 11 in 1976,” Mahlasela continued, explaining the story behind this last tune. “On June 16 there was a student uprising – the youth changed the politics of South Africa.  I joined the movement.  The police rounded us up every year on the anniversary of the uprising.  My grandmother protected me – when the police came she turned off all the lights in the house and opened the kitchen door and she told them ‘Vusi’s here and you’re not going to take him!  I’ve got a pot of boiling water and the first one who comes in here gets it!’ 

And then, dancing with his guitar, he launched into the song.  It ends with a happy, catchy, looping refrain – “my song of life, my song of love” – which, along with thunderous applause, accompanied his exit from the stage.

Review: West Side Story, 54 Years Later

by Susan Kepecs

Four days after seeing the touring production of West Side Story's 50^th anniversary revival, which premiered on Broadway in 2009 and came to Overture Hall on Tues., Feb. 12, I’m still singing the songs – proof of the old Broadway musical’s artistic potency.  Being an old Boomer, I saw the original touring production at the long-gone Erlanger Theater in Chicago with my artsy, bohemian parents in the winter of ’59-60. When the movie came out a year later I saw that, too, more than once.  I owned the LP and played the rings off it.  My friends and I imitated the play’s linguistic coolness – the Jets snapping their fingers and going “Go, Daddy-O!”

It’s been more decades than I want to count since I’ve thought about West Side Story.  Watching the revival Tuesday night I ricocheted constantly between the sheer joy of remembering all the words to all the songs and the shock of recognizing its racist / sexist content – for the first time. West Side Story is a 20^th century take on Romeo and Juliet, but it’s built on an ethnic conflict Shakespeare’s lily-white Elizabethan characters could never conceive – the post WWII Puerto Rican migration from the island to New York.  The Jets – the “American” gang (though Puerto Rico, a US territory, is “America” too, without the right to vote) – reign supreme. “We’re the Jets! The greatest!”  In song, dance, and spoken lyrics the white boys shout at the unfortunate Sharks to “go back home!” Anita, the girlfriend of Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, is a cartoonish stereotype of a “hot Latina.”  She gets gang-raped by the Jets, while no white girl is similarly treated.

Today it seems impossible that the quartet of gay Jewish men who created West Side Story – Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, four of the greatest talents in 20^th century theater – could have been so naïve.  Or that the hip, urban audiences of the ‘50s and ‘60s were, too. But if you can shake the antiquated implications of West Side Story and take it as a period piece, the revival (directed by Laurents, who wrote the original script, directed the 2009 production on Broadway, and died in 2011) bears the test of time. 

The touring cast was uneven.  Marijoanna Grisso, as María, has a lovely, bel canto-ish voice, though the handsome Addison Reid Coe, as Tony, couldn’t hit his high notes, which was distracting. But the Bernstein / Sondheim score is still brilliant.  The  restaging is pleasantly old-school, simple but clever.  The revival’s a teensy bit bilingual, which lends a smidge of new authenticity – and touches of humor – to the action beneath the West Side highway.  It tickled my funny bone when one of the Puerto Rican girls told the others that “María está bailando con un gringo que realmente es Polaco,” because I didn’t expect it; I laughed out loud when Gladhand, the social worker character whose job is to smooth relations between the Jets and the Sharks at the dance at the gym, spoke pidgeon Spanglish, accentuating the fact that he didn’t roll his “r’s” – “A little abstinencia, pohr favohr!”

The pinnacle of the play, though, was Joey McKneely’s dusting-off of Jerome Robbins’ spunky choreography – the amazing Robbins was, of course, along with George Balanchine, the quintessential 20^th century choreographer. McKneely stuck close to the original, but the dancers in today’s musicals have much better technique than most of their predecessors, lending the dances surprising new power.

I’ll probably never see West Side Story again, but I’m really glad I caught it one last time.

Picking Tickets: Spring, 2013

by Susan Kepecs

The spring performing arts season is about to start, and here’s why you need it: This is end times for liberal arts education.  The UW-Madison’s pitching to pick a CEO for Chancellor (to replace interim and former chancellor David Ward, who’s a geographer and who was preceeded by a long line of distinguished intellectual / academics).  And – alerted to this phenomenon by Jim Hightower, who addressed the same issue at the University of California in his one of his Common Sense commentaries on WORT last week – I’ve discovered that the University of Wisconsin now has a marketing director, whose job is to turn this institution of higher learning into a commercial brand.  The transnational corporations that are running the world – “corporations are people, my friend” – are doing their damndest to turn us all into soulless little robots.  While the rich get richer, one of the few ways you, a member of the 99%, can cling to your humanity is through what’s left of the arts.  And though the offerings for ’12 were fewer than usual, there’s an abundant number of whopping, life-affirming shows coming up.

The LINES / Hubbard Street Dance collaboration – an unusual amalgam – comes to Overture Hall on March 20.  The two companies are strikingly distinct; LINES’ cosmic ballets and Hubbard Street’s contemporary repertory works anchor two ends of the twenty-first century dance performance spectrum. Last year Hubbard Street artistic director Glenn Edgerton asked his LINES counterpart, Alonzo King, whose depth as a choreographer is second to none, to create a work for both companies.  King, intrigued, responded with “Azimuth,” which premieres in Berkeley and Chicago in February and mid-March, moving on to Madison immediately thereafter. Each company also presents a work or two from its own repertory, so you’ll be able to see how the organizations are different, as well as how they mesh.

After its near-hiatus last year Madison Ballet offers two programs this spring, starting with Dracula (world premiere March 8, Overture’s Capitol Theater; runs through March 10).  Various companies have created original Draculas over the last couple of decades; Madison Ballet artistic director W. Earle Smith's been devising his version of the Gothic vampire tale for the last five years.  Smith, a versatile choreographer, has explored the contemporary, sexy side of ballet in various repertory works including “Expressions,” from the “Evening of Romance” program on Valentine’s Day, 2011, and “Night Dances,” which premiered at Overture’s gala opening in 2004.  Dracula, a steampunk ballet with an original rock score by Madison composer Michael Massey, is Smith’s first full-length narrative effort in this vein. From the looks of it, this production will be fun – and the most artistically challenging work to date for this bright, fast-growing company.

Madison Ballet’s 2013 repertory program, “Exposed,” runs at the Bartell, a new venue for the company, on April 19-20.  I’m partial to these shows for the opportunity they afford to see dancers dance, without all the trappings of a story production.  In addition to a few new works, Smith’s revisiting his short, lovely pas de deux to Caccini’s “Ave María,” from 2008; the dance originally was set on the elastic Rachelle Butler, who reprises the role.  Also on this program is George Balanchine’s little gem of pure ballet “Valse – Fantasie,” the rights to which Madison Ballet recently acquired from the Balanchine Trust.

Li Chiao Ping Dance premieres “Riot of Spring” – Li’s first new work since Knotcracker in 2010 – at Overture’s Promenade Hall, May 2-5.  It’s a celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the revolutionary Rite of Spring (score by Stravinsky, choreography by Nijinsky), an ode to tribal ritual that sparked an uprising at its Paris premiere by shocking the Belle Epoch bourgeousie expecting classical ballet. Li, a wizard of intellectual wit, says “Riot of Spring” is inspired by the “étonné moi!” spirit of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, for which Stravinsky’s work was commissioned. “Riot” will run over half an hour, and Li expects to premiere another work or two on this program.  As she often does, she’ll augment her professional company with some performers from her community group, a practice that adds layers of postmodern nuance to her definition of dance.   

Two Afropop superstars who’ve both visited Madison on Acoustic Africa tours deliver divine inspiration for tough times.  South African singer / songwriter / guitarist / activist Vusi “the Voice” Mahlasela wields his velvety, rangy voice and the soothing, Soweto-style rhythms and harmonies of his songs in the service of social justice on February 15 at the Wisconsin Union Theater at The Sett, Union South. Mahlasela grew up hanging out at his grandmother’s sheebeen speakeasy listening to mbaquanga and Motown. And like his revered predecessors Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masakela, Mahlasela, born into apartheid, is a freedom fighter.  Mahlasela cites Makeba – and also Chilean revolutionary songmaker Victor Jara (who was murdered in ’73 when Chilean president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a CIA-supported coup) – as his principal influences.

Oliver Mtukudzi – a living legend of a singer / songwriter / guitarist from Zimbabwe – plays the Wisconsin Union Theater at the Sett on April 12. Unlike Mahlasela, and despite myriad political-economic problems in his homeland, Mtukudzi insists he doesn’t write outright resistance music.  But the joyful, borderless sound he calls “Tuku music” fuses the relevant, responsible lyrics of chimurenga (Zimbabwean social justice music) with gentle, polyphonic m’bira, the swift Harare beat called jit and South African mbaquanga, itself a mix of Zulu jive, township jazz and Xhosa tribal twists.

I’ve heard a rumor or two I can’t yet confirm about big-time imported Latin music acts, so cross your fingers, do a little dance to the deities and stay tuned.  Meanwhile, keep an eye on the club calendars – especially the Cardinal Bar’s.  The Cardinal, in fact, is saoco city on February 15, when two superlative bands play back to back – El Clan Destino (for Happy Hour, 5-7 PM), followed by Madisalsa at 10.  (If you’re loca like me you can catch El Clan, speed down to the Sett for Vusi Mahlasela, and make it back to the Bird before the end of Madisalsa’s first set.) 

In the realm of straight-ahead black American music (thanks for the term, Nicholas Payton), NEA jazzmaster and mainstream sax heavyweight Branford Marsalis and his quartet play Overture Hall on February 28.  My instinct is to rebel against concert-hall expositions of music that’s best enjoyed in a nightclub – or at least a funky little venue like Music Hall, where the Ninety Miles Project knocked my socks off in November.  But you can’t really go wrong with Marsalis.  His latest album’s got a catchy title – Four MFs Playin’ Tunes – it’s slick, and the reviews are all raves.

A somewhat more intimate jazz performance is in the offing when rising young pianist / composer Gerald Clayton and his trio play the Wisconsin Union Theater at Town Center in the Institutes for Discovery on April 6.  The venue’s something of an experiment for the temporarily homeless theater, but Clayton, who comes from a jazz family background and who already has three Grammy noms under his belt, is definitely someone to watch as mainstream bop marches into the future.