Milwaukee dancers since childhood, Katie Rhyme and Karen Raymond didn’t want to seek careers in other cities. After earning Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from UW-Milwaukee’s rigorous dance program in 2009 and seeing few opportunities here to create and perform dance on a regular basis, they founded a company, Dance Revolution Milwaukee; its mission: to provide dance opportunities for local artists.
After performing at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival in 2012, Raymond and Rhyme began what has become their company’s signature offering, MKE Follies , a variety show of performances by local artists of many sorts, a fascinating mix of short takes by established and emerging performers presented back to back, a mini Milwaukee Fringe Festival. The ninth installment of MKE Follies will take place Friday, Nov. 21, at The Box Downtown. The Catey Ott Dance Collective, Cadance Collective, Warped Dance Company, singer-songwriter Rocket Paloma and comedian Joshua Ballew are on the bill.
Choreographer Catey Ott Thompson praises The Box as “an art bar NYC style with minimal furnishings, industrial high ceilings and avant-garde décor; artists can therefore completely fill each performance slot with their own personalities.”
Ott Thompson left Milwaukee for NYC with a dance BFA from UWM. She founded her Dance Collective in New York and built an impressive career there. In 2013, after 17 years, she moved home and remade her company here. Her newest work “Within” is “a non-linear inner journey from a guided meditation given to me as a high school student by my Pius XI religion teacher Gary Giombi in 1989,” she says. She’ll perform the world premiere in MKE Follies with company dancers Danielle Allen, Cynthia Collins and Elizabeth O’Keefe and repeat it the next day at Pius XI High School’s Fall Student Dance Concert where her current Marquette University dance students will perform additional works by their accomplished teacher.
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Cadance Collective is the music-dance collaboration of flutist/dancer Emma Koi, cellist Alicia Storin and dancer Christal Wagner of Danceworks Performance Company. “ MKE Follies produced our debut performance in March 2013,” Koi says. “As emerging artists who work in an unconventional way, we’re grateful for any opportunity to present our work to new audiences. MKE Follies gives Milwaukee a chance to see all the incredible talent the city has to offer.” And, Storin adds, “The Box has almost all front-row seats.”
The group will premiere “Tidal,” described as a visual and sonic landscape of original music, dance and folk songs exploring ideas of breath and ocean. “We intended to work on a piece about breath and found a correlation with the sigh of the ocean tide,” Wagner explains. “We also talked about the sorrow of the ocean, the loneliness and loss it holds.” Rather than set movement to music, Cadance Collective explores interfaces between those art forms, asking, “How can a flutist express the complexity of the breath that happens before the sound? Why can’t a dancer make a musical score using breath? What does the word ‘seized’ sound like on a cello?” Their collaboration is young, but Koi, Storin and Wagner are proven artists in their fields.
The other acts are new to me. Warped Dance Collective was founded in 2007 by Maria Hackbarth with several missions: to mentor young dancers for the demands of a professional dance career, to create art without boundaries and to educate communities about the relevance of dance. The website lists a remarkable history of international performances. At MKE Follies , they’ll present their “Sacred Contracts.”
Rocket Paloma, aka Joanna Kerner, was a commissioned composer for Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s Eurydice Festival at Carroll University last January. Her folk-opera duet, “Crumbling Love,” was performed by the Carroll theater students. A 2009 theatre graduate of Cardinal Stritch, she describes her music as “an assault on the senses that is philosophical, sassy and peppered with profanity.”
Joshua Ballew hosts the bimonthly Last Laugh Open Mic at Art*Bar in Riverwest and the Internet show “Levity Radio” on Riverwest Radio. He calls his comedy a mix of personal experience and subtle social criticism.
A 10th MKE Follies is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 23, 2015. Barring catastrophe, new shows will appear at two-month intervals throughout the year at The Box or spaces unknown. Raymond and Rhyme are working to inaugurate a full-scale Milwaukee Fringe Festival in 2016. Milwaukee Comedy Festival founder Matt Kemple is advising them. Those who want to make this grand expansion of the Follies a reality should visit facebook.com/mkefringe.
MKE Follies takes place at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 21 at The Box, 628 N. Broadway. Tickets are $12 at the door or online at brownpapertickets.com. Profits from ticket sales go to performers.
