Danceworks Performance Company (DPC) opens its season with Footsteps, Shadows and Whispers. The concert includes six works by DPC company members and guests featuring multi-media explorations of footsteps, shadows, whispers, dreaming and memory.
DPC Artistic Director Dani Kuepper choreographs a dance in collaboration with Allen Russell, co-founder of The Tontine Ensemble, an exciting new string quartet that plays exclusively contemporary music and blends classical training with improvisation. The process began with drawings Russell made, which he says “look like music—strokes and motions meant to show elemental reactions.” Kuepper used these to create choreographic imagery, which she says centers on dreaming—its transitions and the role it plays in “helping you grown and learn.” Russell completed the loop, composing a score to fit the movement. Listen for a mixture of through-composed and improvised music influenced by everything from the late-Romantic period to cinematic scoring. Extended bow technique will evoke whispers and footsteps.
Guest Dawn Springer will re-make a past dance, “Dreams of Flight,” with DPC members. This unique offering features no musical cues, giving the audience the opportunity to examine the “the audible footsteps of the dancers and the internal rhythm of the piece that the movement creates,” Springer says. She hopes to “use the sort of weightedness and the relentless kinesthesia of gravity that we collectively experience to contrast the hope or the lightness of imagination, the lightness of a dream.”
Fellow guest Kym McDaniel integrates film and live dance for her piece. The work is drawn from a film she made to evoke “limbs swimming in ink.” This piece will include projected personal writing related to body image, physical pain and “what it would be like to live in another person’s body.” Upward-pointing lighting instruments will cast the ceiling in dramatic shadows.
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DPC company member Chrystal Wagner is involved in two pieces’ creation. The first features Cadence Collective, Wagner’s project with flutist Emma Koi and cellist Alicia Storin. Period songs such as “April in Paris” and work by The Andrews Sisters round out a score highlighting interviews the three collected at the Shorewood Senior Resource Center in which seniors reflected on their experiences of the Eagles Ballroom in the 1950s and ’60s. Of the theme, Wagner notes, “Footsteps, shadows and whispers are like this distant memory that you can kind of remember but in the meantime you’re actually tearing up your memories and trying to forget things that happened in the past.”
Wagner’s other work explores auditory and visual looping to create a snapshot of Purgatory. It features a song by the Punch Brothers that reminds her of a “devil dance.” Kuepper says this energetic offering involves “running, sliding and rolling.”
Finally, DPC artist Gina Laurenzi addresses the theme of shadows through a ghostly dueting technique. Reflecting on dancing as a “ghost” in the piece, Wagner says, “We’re actual shadows in a sense but, as we’re following our humans, we’re really reacting and improvising in real time. It’s improvised until it falls into a pattern and I think that helps the idea that your shadow isn’t exactly you, it’s an embellishment of you.
See Danceworks’ Facebook page for sneak peek videos from the show.
Performances run Nov. 5-8 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. For tickets call 414-278-0765 or visit nextact.org.
