Stormy histories
Ballet choreographer finds common theme in Harvey, Katrina and the Middle Passage.
Two years after Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, seven years after Sandy, 14 years after Katrina and up to four centuries after the Middle Passage era that brought Africans to America on slave
ships, choreographer Jeremy McQueen sees themes repeating.
One, aside from the obvious watery hell, is resilience in communities of color. That idea drives his new ballet “The Storm.” Commissioned by the Ford Foundation and the Radio City Rockettes, the 25-minute dance premieres Friday at Miller Outdoor Theatre, during the first Texas performance for McQueen’s Black Iris Project.
With the 3-year-old collaborative company, whose performers are mostly dancers of color, McQueen aims to fill a void. He’s creating an original touring work each year — not “Swan Lake” or “The Sleeping Beauty” with black dancers but all-new narratives, across a variety of idioms, based on black history or the black experience.
Based in New York, the Black Iris Project enlists professional dancers from across the country each summer, when many of them have time off from jobs with other companies. “Dancers are always looking for work
in the summer,” McQueen says. “It’s a huge opportunity for us to bring them together.”
A San Diego native who graduated 11 years ago from The Ailey School/Fordham University, McQueen began his career as a dancer with the national touring companies of “Wicked” and “The Color Purple” as well as the New York and touring companies of “Radio City Christmas Spectacular.”
Winning one of three Choreographers of Color awards in 2013 from the Joffrey Ballet, he created the dance that would eventually become his company’s signature, “Black Iris.” Also on the Miller program, that piece borrows its title from Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting “Black Iris III,” which McQueen saw at a museum during an emotionally difficult time: His mother had gotten a cancer diagnosis, and he was 3,000 miles away. “It’s a ballet for the three strong black women (including an aunt and a grandmother) who
taught me to be courageous and strong,” he said.
Maternal instincts also inform “A Mother’s Rite,” a solo set to
Igor Stravinsky’s turbulent “Rite of Spring” that explores a mother’s stages of grief after police murder her son. “It’s a fictional story based on the lives of real mothers,” McQueen says. “Therapy is often not affordable, and it’s also taboo in communities of color.”
The Miller program also includes a brief duet about a young, black, gay male coming of age.
Along with a few of his regulars, McQueen hired six Houston dancers for “The Storm.” Mondo Morales designed the costumes and a quiltlike fabric set that evokes water and waves — “both life-giving and life-taking,” McQueen says.
He dove into the history of the Middle Passage last year after hearing Lupe Fiasco’s conceptual rap song “WAV Files,” which conjures an underwater afterlife for Africans who committed suicide by leaping overboard from slave ships.
But the score for the new ballet is not rap. It’s classical composer Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s lushly orchestrated “Isle of the Dead,” which was inspired by a wildly popular 19th-century painting of a lone figure on a boat, approaching a forboding island. McQueen also draws ideas from community-outreach sessions. In Houston and New Orleans, he asked participants,“How do you weather the storm when the storms of life are raging?”
But truthfully, he already has an answer of his own — a favorite line from the animated film “Finding Nemo” that he considers a kind of spirit guide: “Just keep swimming,” he says. “I always feel like I’m going against the current.”