En Pointe: Building Appreciation for Wisconsin Ballet
Alaina Wendlandt

It is not a typical Friday morning at Milwaukee Montessori school, as children are ushered into the church auditorium to prepare for a morning of classical ballet education—a subject stereotypically pinned as yawn-worthy and stuffy.

On this particular morning, however, interactive storytelling and characters in tights and sparkling tutus take the place of musty encyclopedias. The lesson, titled "The King Who Danced," is led by costumed dancers from the Milwaukee Ballet’s second company and Alyson Vivar, director of education for the ballet.

Vivar and her dancing accomplices take the children from the earliest days of the classic dance style, starting with King Louis XIV all the way to Milwaukee ballet today, highlighting time periods when dancers risked their lives to perform as they were suspended in mid-air by wires or set afire when costumes brushed against candles lighting the theater. In the same era, fanatics of famous Italian ballerina Marie Taglioni were rumored to have cooked and ate her dance shoes as a display of affection.

This narrated performance, part of the Milwaukee Ballet’s city outreach program titled “Ballet-in-a-Box,” elicits poignant responses from its captive, yet critical audience. Kids wrinkle their noses as the first male dancer enters wearing traditional tights. Others give standing ovations to another dancer’s “grand allegro”—an impressive combination of large jumps and turns, requiring a significant level of athleticism and training.

The “Ballet-in-a-Box” tour, which runs four weeks of each year, is not just a chance for the ballet company to entertain children. It represents a shared mission among many classical dance artists around the state to strike down misconceptions that have led to ballet’s dwindled popularity. It is one piece of a collective effort to revive respect for the art in Wisconsin, starting with the children, from the ground up.

Building audiences
One active participant in the collective revival is actively working in Madison to combine outreach programs similar to Milwaukee’s “Ballet-in-a-Box.” With classical ballet teaching to instill a love for the art within the city’s children, Earle Smith, artistic director of Madison Ballet, coins the central goals behind what he does as organization, access to the art form and “building audiences.”

Now in his ninth season as the school’s artistic director, Smith has nurtured the school by elevating artistry and professionalism since 2005. He began by plucking advanced dancers from mom-and-pop studios around the city and training them once a week.

“To [build a dance community] you’ve got to have the artists—the dancers that can perform at a professional level,” he said.

Madison Ballet’s goal: to create an institution equivalent to the size and prestige of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and Madison Opera. The school is now more than 300 dancers strong and this year—for the first time in city’s history—Madison will have a professional ballet company.
Sixteen dancers, mostly from the Midwest, will join the ballet to rock its quaint studio walls. Smith's most advanced girls, of high school and junior-high age, will now compete head on with professionals, ultimately stretching them to become better dancers.

The girls are not the only dancers challenged at Madison Ballet. Every Monday night, 12 to 15 boys attend the school’s all-boys ballet class. Most schools of Madison Ballet's size teach a fraction of this number of male students, making Madison Ballet a true rarity in the Midwest.

The class started as a fluke, Smith said. Madison-area parents came to him voicing concern at their sons’ struggles to participate in the stereotypically female-centric art form. This prompted Smith to host an all-boys ballet workshop to reinforce the male identity in ballet. It was well-attended and wildly successful, leading the school to add it as a regular course. Smith attributes the class’ success to Madison’s unique liberal environment.

“The stereotypical methods of raising a male are changing. We are becoming more and more tolerant of gender identity and sexual orientation,” Smith said. “Madison is a liberal town [where] it’s cool to be a guy ballet dancer.”

Most ballet choreographers and teachers would likely tell you that the very concept of “cool” is the bane of their artistic existence. Without a Madison-esque free-love embrace and support, other abundantly talented Wisconsin artists must fight much harder to raise audiences in their own communities.

“Apple’s-Way-U.S.A”
Appleton’s Makaroff School of Ballet is one such labor of love. There, artistic director and teacher Jeanette Makaroff instructs an entire school while simultaneously choreographing performances for its newly-revived nonprofit sister entity, the Makaroff Youth Ballet.

The youth ballet, comprised of 20 to 30 intermediate and advanced-level dancers, performs twice each season and operates with the declared mission to “make the fine art of ballet performance accessible to the community through its talented young dancers.”

“This is a small town—I used to call it ‘Apple’s-Way-U.S.A.’ And it’s a beautiful little town. There is a lot of art here, in terms of visual arts, dramatic arts, musical art . . . but the classical dance arts are not—except for my mother and my father,” Makaroff said.

The school is one of the smallest in the area, but well known for its excellence, starting with the school’s founders, Nikolai and Juanita Makaroff. Nikolai was born in Russia and trained by the Bloshoi in Moscow, one of the most prestigious Russian ballet companies existing to this day. After World War II, he went on to live and dance in Munich and then in New York City, where he met and married his wife at the School of American Ballet.

In 1960, the Makaroffs moved to the Valley to be closer to Juanita’s family and found the areas first and only classical ballet school.

“My dad moved to this tiny little town and struggled to get people to take dance seriously as an art form,” Makaroff said. “And just when you think that you are reaching the public and educating the public about what real ballet is about, a whole new generation crops up and you have to start all over again.”

This cyclical pattern reaches beyond the scope of dancers within the school, to also affect the audience and ticket sales, according to Makaroff.

Their problem is certainly not a lack of experience or talent. Jeanette Makaroff was trained from the age of 13 at the North Carolina School of the Arts and later at the School of American Ballet. She moved on to dance for the North Carolina Dance Theater and later Milwaukee Ballet, where she performed as a company soloist, choreographer and teacher for 20 years.

Over a dozen of her students claimed professional ballet careers, including Center Stage’s motion picture star Ethan Stiefel.

“We’re not professional, we don’t pretend to be professional, but we are serious about what we do,” Makaroff said. That same relentless commitment translates through to Makaroff’s teaching-style.

Each Saturday afternoon this fall, the youth ballet’s dancers squeezed into the school’s basement studio for four-plus hours to learn and demonstrate a remarkable amount of choreography. Their rehearsal readied them for the company’s first-ever full-length performance of the Nutcracker Ballet under Makaroff's artistic direction, performed at Lawrence University’s Stansbury Theater.

Only in ballet does the tinkling of bobby pins flying out of girls’ hair reveal the intensity of their rehearsal, and there was no shortage of flying pins at Makaroff’s rehearsals.

Her dancers could not know that at the end of the day, after being pushed to fatigue and tears, Makaroff would speak of them with reverence and love. She teaches them to not only be professionals, but to enrich their lives and perpetuate a shared experience.

“I know what it feels like to be up on a pointe shoe and do five or six pirouettes on my own. I know what it feels like to be in my partner’s arms and be able to give myself over to the music. And I’ll never forget what that feels like,” Makaroff said.

“Maybe it’s sheer indulgence, maybe it’s total selfishness, but not of a negative variety. It’s something that I have. I love teaching. I love giving it to these students. These girls were dead and exhausted, but yet they kept picking themselves up and doing it again . . . once they get it right, you can see, as tired as they are, there’s this look behind their eyes. It’s something that we all share and I don’t really know how to put that into words.”

The Makaroff Youth Ballet, led by a new board of directors and fiery artistic director, hopes to move into newer studio facilities, participate in international and national dance festivals, and perform their full-length Nutcracker Ballet in the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, located just ten steps away from the Makaroff School of Ballet studio.

On a fundamental level, Makaroff teaches to continue the 47-year legacy started by her family. Just as Earle Smith and Alyson Vivar, she also teaches to maintain the identity of classical ballet in her community. From different ends of Wisconsin, with different resources and support systems, the work from behind the same fervent desire to perpetuate the love for classical dance.

Smith echoes the great choreographer and founder of American ballet George Balanchine, when explaining the philosophy behind Madison Ballet: “But first, a school.”

After Milwaukee Ballet’s finale performance, the school children usher out of the auditorium like little ducklings in single file lines. One blonde duckling, three and a half feet tall and clad in a fuzzy pink sweater, stretches out her arms in what she did not know to be an artfully perfect arabesque position.

Her teacher asks the duckling if she, too, wants to be a ballerina. She looks brightly and innocently upwards into her teachers’ eyes and shrugs. Maybe, just maybe, she will.