Tucson Weekly: That's The Spirit (November 13

'Días de Muertos' Puts A Post-Mortem Spin On Euro-Centric Dance Conventions.
By Margaret Regan
A WALL FULL of skulls, skeleton masks and altars heaped with flowers are hardly the ingredients of traditional ballet, but Ballet Arizona's brand-new Días de Muertos mercifully deviates from European ballet conventions.
Playing in Tucson on Friday night and Saturday afternoon at UA Centennial Hall, the dance is a contemporary work that defiantly embraces New World themes and aesthetics. There are no dying swans or mincing dead brides here. Instead, the work is shaped by the traditions of the Mexican Day of the Dead. The holiday's golden marigolds and gleaming white skulls are transposed to the stage via the paintings and bas-relief sculptures of Mexican artist Rafael Cauduro. Mexican composer Eugenio Toussaint wrote an orchestral score that has Mexican traditional music at its heart. And its story, written by Mexican author Berta Hiriart, tells the tale of a contemporary family of Mexican immigrants fleeing to the frozen precincts of El Norte.
Review "It's a theatrical piece that transcends any one of the art forms," says Michael Uthoff, the Ballet Arizona artistic director who produced the work and put together the team of Mexican artists. "It has dance, theatre, music, sculpture and painting." There are no spoken words, though. The tale is told through the ballet movements Uthoff himself choreographed for 36 dancers. The Tucson performance will be danced to recorded music.
Fresh from the work's premiere outside Phoenix on November 1, the actual Día de los Muertos, Uthoff was ebullient over a standing ovation from an audience of about 3,500 ("they rose up as one, screaming") and a laudatory review (Kenneth LaFave of the Arizona Republic called it a "minor masterpiece"). The response, Uthoff said, was "astounding, everything I thought it could be. After three years, I deserved it."
Uthoff may be exaggerating when he claims that the dance didn't entirely gel until a half-hour before opening night curtain, but he's been trying to put it together for years. During his time as artistic director of the Hartford Ballet, he had thought of composing a dance for Halloween, but he dismissed the usual Dracula and werewolf choices as too obvious. Five years ago, when he moved to Arizona to take over Ballet Arizona, he found himself enchanted by the "cross-cultural" currents between the region's Hispanic and Anglo cultures.
"I was delighted to see the impact of the Day of the Dead," he says. "I thought that could be a tie-in with the traditions of Halloween. But I didn't want to get bogged down in anthropological studies. I wanted something more universal."
He also wanted a cross-cultural team of artists. He first started talking up the project three years ago at a party in the American embassy in Mexico City. But it wasn't until a subsequent trip to Mexico City a year later, when he was judging a choreographic competition, that "a guardian angel was watching over me. I met the scriptwriter, the composer and the set designer."
First up was Hiriart, a journalist and writer of children's books, whom Uthoff met at an embassy reception for the playwright Edward Albee. He found her writing full of "romantic, beautiful imagery." Next was composer Toussaint, recommended by a friend as someone who could meet Uthoff's requirements for "a composer who could think of Mexico as part of the world." Finally, Uthoff went round to an exhibition of Cauduro paintings at the theatre of Bellas Artes, where he was knocked out by the artist's "baroque modernism, his sense of beauty and the grotesque." When he called Cauduro at his studio, the painter happened to be at work on a Day of the Dead painting. "I said, 'It's too great of a coincidence.' He said, 'sure,' he'd do it."
The team gathered at the embassy before Uthoff came back home to Arizona, and continued consulting separately with him as the work evolved. Monica Raya signed on for scenic design, bringing theatrical experience to Cauduro's artistic skills, and Joshua Starbuck designed the lighting. The production's first costume designer quit in May of this year, and Judanna Lynn stepped in at the last moment, designing some 100 costumes in two or three weeks. Uthoff didn't turn from producing to choreographing until August, and he was interrupted in the middle for several weeks of rehearsals for the company's season opener, Basically Balanchine.
"It was tasking but exhilarating," he says.
The first act of the ambitious ballet is set in Mexico, the second in the United States, where the family travels in search of a better life. The oldest daughter, Tina, worries that the spirits of the ancestors won't be able to find them in the new land. (Tina will be danced in Tucson alternately by Bonnie Rich and Lisa Gillespie.) When Tina sees a funeral procession, she sends a message to the dead that she will leave a trail of marigolds along the way to her new home. In the North, the family is terrified by children in Halloween masks, distraught about strange ways of living, and tortured by the cold.
Despite some of its difficult themes, Uthoff says the work is appropriate for children, noting that "characters are spirits, skeletons, animals. It's as accessible as you can get." Nevertheless, Uthoff, a native of Chile who emigrated to the U.S. as an 18-year-old, acknowledges that the story of the immigrant family's travails carries a "political undercurrent. But it doesn't hit you in the face. Nobody gets beaten at the border. You'll think about it after you leave the theatre...The message is we can all live together."
Días de Muertos, a co-production of Ballet Arizona and UApresents, will be performed at Centennial Hall at 8 p.m. Friday, November 14, and at 2 p.m. Saturday, November 15. Gray Montague, Ballet Arizona's executive director, leads a free discussion in Centennial Hall 45 minutes before each performance. Tickets for the show are $18, $23 and $29. Students with ID and children 18 and under get in for half-price. Tickets are available at all Dillard's outlets, and at the Centennial box office (621-3341).

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