Michael Linsmeier, an integral part of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s roster for the past thirteen years, gave his final performance on June 9 at the Newmark Theatre, dancing in Makino Hayashi’s The Message 2024 and, at his request, the “men in tutus” section of Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Fluidity of Steel.
Now 38, Linsmeier is ending his career as a dancer, but not as a performer: He continues to lead his punk rock band, Taint Misbehavin’, which he took on a national tour right after the OBT season ended. (He’s been playing drums, self-taught, since he was 21. It relieves the pressure of dancing, he says, and informs dancing, too, helping him find the pulse: “I’m rhythm-oriented.”)
Starting in the fall, or possibly the winter, he plans to train to become a massage therapist at the East West College of Medicine. “I want to step away for a bit, then engage in the healing part of dance,” he told me in an interview in the lobby of the Newmark the day before he took the stage for the last time.
Since 2011, when then-artistic director Christopher Stowell hired him as a company artist, we have seen Linsmeier in a wide range of roles, spanning a couple of centuries of ballet history. He reminded me of my Neapolitan uncle as the Lemonade Seller in Bournonville’s Napoli, gesticulating the same way in conversation with the Macaroni Seller in the first act — speaking, if you will, with face and body only as a member of the onstage audience of the third-act wedding festivities.
In the same choreographer’s La Sylphide, as a gamekeeper and friend of James, the hero in love with a Sylph who nobody else can see, Linsmeier’s desperate yet silent cries for James to return as he chased after the woodland sprite on what should have been his boss’s wedding day were audible.
In Ben Stevenson’s version of Dracula, Linsmeier danced Renfield, a character who is possibly even more evil than his master. Hunched over, skittering across the floor like the spiders he dines on, he acts as Dracula’s procurer — and for one dedicated OBT audience member, this was Linsmeier’s most memorable performance. “He was a knockout,” she told me, and I believe it.
More recently, in February of this year in Trey McIntyre’s Peter Pan, the solidly built dancer transformed himself into an awkward, impetuous four-year-old as John Darling, flinging himself onto his bed in Act One in a tantrum, flailing a bit as he flew off to Neverland. Once there, unlike his big sister Wendy, in his interactions with the pirates he showed no fear at all, only wide-eyed interest.
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We’ve seen him as secondary characters in better-known traditional story ballets as well: in two different versions of Swan Lake (Stowell’s staging and former OBT artistic director Kevin Irving’s); in the 2016 revival of James Canfield’s Romeo and Juliet, in which he performed Mercutio, whose witty and technically challenging ballroom solo requires a high jump and cynical flair; and in Stowell’s The Sleeping Beauty. Medium-sized, blue-eyed, and high-cheek-boned, Linsmeier has performed just about every male role in Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, including the technically demanding Candy Cane divertissement, a comically sinister Drosselmeier, and in 2013, the princely role of the Cavalier, earning him a promotion to soloist.
In shorter ballets, he’s been a high-energy competitive ballroom dancer in Matjash Mrowzewski’s The Last Dance; a vicious porn film director in Dani Rowe’s Wooden Dimes; a hard-working pioneer man in Trey McIntyre’s Robust American Love; a Catalan peasant in Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato’s Jardi Tancat; a Haitian rebel in the same choreographer’s Por Los Muertos; one of the slaves illicitly in love with a harem girl in Dennis Spaight’s Scheherazade; and a goopy-faced, sentimental Lysander in the revival of Stowell’s chic, quirky version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
What did Stowell originally see in Linsmeier? “It has been a while since I hired Michael, so my thoughts at the time aren’t very clear,” Stowell replied via email. “However, he has an interesting combination of qualities — sound training with an emphasis on articulation and an exploratory and open nature that has allowed him to reinvent himself over the course of his long career at OBT. Congratulations to him! He’s also a real team player and all around good guy.”
That training started at the Jean Wolfmeyer Dance School in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where Linsmeier grew up on a dairy farm, and where his sisters also studied. He started with tap and moved on to ballet a bit later. He was in middle school when a recruiter from Richmond’s Virginia School of the Arts visited the Wolfmeyer School and invited him to spend his high school years there.
He graduated in 2005 and returned to Wisconsin, where his professional career began with the Milwaukee Ballet, under the artistic direction of Michael Pink, where he danced for the next seven years. The repertoire was similar to OBT’s — a balance of classical and not-so-classical story ballets and more contemporary works — and it was there that he first performed in choreography by Moultrie and McIntyre, specifically McIntyre’s Second Before the Ground, an early work about the shock and delight of first love.
“I did my first petite allegro in that and it was incredibly demanding and awesomely hard to do,” Linsmeier said. (All jumps and turns in the air are considered allegro and require elevation and ballon, the seemingly effortless ease with which a dancer appears to hover in the air.)
Linsmeier loves working with McIntyre: “He’s efficient and knows what he wants.” McIntyre, who has been working with Linsmeier for a couple of decades, had this to say about him: “It’s been such a pleasure to work with Michael and see him mature during his career through a foundation of true integrity. When I first met him, he was a fireworks explosion, busting at the seams. More energy than anyone in the room. As he has matured, he has really surprised with a depth of vulnerability and artistry that I’m not sure I saw coming. One of the most important things that art can do is surprise, and Michael has mastered it.”
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In his 13 years at OBT, Linsmeier has been given a wide variety of opportunities to hone his craft and develop characters, something he says he loves to do, and he has seized every one of them. The lemonade seller in Napoli, he told me, was “so much fun.” And he listened carefully to stager Frank Andersen, who told the dancers in rehearsal for La Sylphide that “if you didn’t believe in the story, the characters you were dancing, the audience wouldn’t believe in them either.”
I asked Linsmeier if he believed in all the characters he dances, from the various roles in The Nutcracker to the toddler in McIntyre’s Peter Pan.
“Absolutely,” he replied, adding that when he was in Richmond, and dancing a romantic pas de deux, he was told that “if I failed to convey love the children in the audience would know it.”
Linsmeier particularly loves character roles, and what he called the exploration of character, citing the timid stepsister in Ben Stevenson’s Cinderella. “I have sisters,” he said, “and I’ve observed their body language.” For Peter Pan’s John Darling, he called on his memories of the young animals on the farm where he grew up, as well as on his younger siblings and the way they use their eyes: “Babies’ eyes are absorbing [everything],” he said. “The world is a big blank piece of paper. And they don’t have full mobility. … Baby animals wobble and stagger to their feet.”
Porn movie directors, on the other hand, neither wobble nor stagger, and in Wooden Dimes, Dani Rowe’s Depression era ballet performed in April, Linsmeier was the personification of arrogance and what he called the character’s hunger for power. And while Catalonia couldn’t be farther away from Manitowoc, geographically or culturally, Linsmeier infused his performance in Jardi Tancat with his memories of laboring in the hot sun on the family farm. Duato requires the cast to dance bent double, rooted to the ground, which is counter to ballet training. “I love the ballet,” Linsmeier said: “It’s so difficult to dance. There are 20 transitions between steps and the positions are extreme.”
Linsmeier chose the excerpt from Fluidity of Steel to conclude his career as a dancer because of the way performing it makes him feel. When Moultrie made the pas de trois on OBT in 2018, he told the dancers: “You’re a monster, because you’re wearing mother’s dress [which is against] society’s expectations. Be beautiful.”
At his last performance, Linsmeier and Brian Simcoe (both from the original cast), joined by Isaac Lee, were certainly that. So was the outpouring of love from Rowe, the dancers, and the cheering audience as Linsmeier, beaming, accepted the traditional bouquets and balloons and ducked the showers of confetti. Character dancers don’t often receive this kind of farewell. Linsmeier absolutely earned it.
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