OnStage: Dancing with Politics

On Nov. 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a Quaker and peace activist, handed his daughter Emily to a stranger, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's Pentagon office.

Last week, members of the James Sewell Ballet reimagined that horrific act while rehearsing Sewell's new work, "Social Movements." The four-part ballet, instigated by St. Paul composer Steve Heitzeg, premieres next weekend at O'Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul.

"I've always admired James' visual language and his political mind," said Heitzeg, who won a regional Emmy award for scoring the public-TV documentary "Death of the Dream (Farmhouses of the Heartland)." In 2005, Heitzeg received a Bush Fellowship, part of which included writing a ballet score for Sewell with political and social themes.

Sewell was game, but he already was at work on "Turf," a disturbing portrayal of imprisonment and torture torn from the headlines on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. When the work was premiered with the Minnesota Orchestra in 2006, many Sewell Ballet patrons communicated their revulsion; others their respect for tackling such tough subject matter.

"It pushed some buttons that audience members didn't want to have pushed," Sewell said.

"It was the closest to a riot we've gotten in the Twin Cities for a ballet," Heitzeg said, "which is good! Some people hated it. Some people loved it. That's a testament to James' vision and creative genius. The work elicited deep responses from people."

Normally, Sewell said, he wouldn't have tackled "Social Movements" -- with its themes of war protest, environmentalism, refugees and human rights -- so soon after "Turf." "But Steve approaches music with a great deal of consciousness and cause," he said, "and when you sign up with Steve, you sign up to go there."

The first section, "Protest," includes projections of graphic, iconic imagery from the 1960s and '70s, including the photograph of a naked, running Phan Thi Kim Phc after a napalm attack and the execution of a Vietnamese prisoner.

"I felt the images needed to be strong to provide a context for why Norman Morrison would respond to the point of self-immolation," Sewell said.

He also "made a conscious decision to tread more on the literal side" in the portrayal of Morrison, who is played by Chris Hannon. "If you can be very literal to frame something, to set up a situation, then you can be more abstract or nuanced on other levels," he said. Because Morrison's widow, Anne Morrison-Welsh, will join Sewell and Heitzeg in pre-performance talks, Sewell added, "I felt an extra responsibility to ground the work in a literal way."

Much of Sewell's work to date has ranged from formalist abstraction to vaudevillian comedy, but his forays into storytelling through dance also tap into a historical tradition dating to romantic narrative ballets of the 19th century.

Political ballet also has plenty of precedent. Kurt Jooss' "The Green Table" (1932) displayed the horrors of war, and Antony Tudor ("Echoing Trumpets"), Kenneth MacMillan ("Gloria) and Jiri Kylian ("Soldiers' Mass") are among the balletmakers to challenge audiences with antiwar content.

Penguin bones

For the work's second section, "Green," Heitzeg composed his percussive score with penguin bones. "I didn't want to use human-made instruments," he said. "The bones make a statement about the dangers of extinction while honoring the animals' spirits. The ticking of the bones is also like the ticking of a clock, underscoring the theme of this section: When will we wake up? Is it too late?"

"Displacement," the refugee section, features folk-dancelike movements of community and support, as other figures corral and sweep the dancers off the stage. In the work's final section, "Equality," titles of legislation from the Magna Carta of 1215 through recent attempts to legalize gay marriage provide the context for a triple pas de deux.

"One of my primary challenges was how to deal with an issue like displacement in eight minutes, without trivializing it," Sewell said. "I could do an evening-length piece on any one of these subjects. 'Social Movements' really reflects the consciousness of the group, as we spent many hours talking about these issues and how to represent them in the simplest, clearest way possible."

A year of big change

Sewell acknowledged that the past year had been challenging, "intense, with lots of transitions." Gary Peterson, executive director since 1995, retired. After a national search, Tony Caparelli, former executive director of the Oakland Ballet, was hired. And Sewell and his wife, Sally Rousse, the company's co-founder, have separated while continuing their positions at the company.

"Our lives are so intertwined, [the separation] really won't change anything [at the company]," Sewell said. In addition to "Social Movements," this weekend's program includes Rousse's "By the Gypsy River Banks" and artist associate Penelope Freeh's "Table Waltz."

Returning to the political subject matter of "Social Movements," Sewell said that such pieces "get people to ask questions about their own thinking. I'm not trying to tell them what to think."

Ballet is as legitimate a forum for such investigations as any other art form, he said.

"Somehow ballet's been relegated to the pretty and nice. I simply don't buy into that. ... It's a language I use to communicate, but I'm a contemporary artist in terms of wanting to reflect the world I live in. Having made 60-plus ballets, I know how to express what I think, but I'm not really so interested in that anymore. I'm interested in sourcing from other places and finding new processes, finding new ways to create new work. That keeps me going and interested."

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities dance critic.