UWM “Winterdances: Transit”
From the earliest days, humans have shared their individual stories and communal concerns in dance. The subjects of the works to be premiered in the UW-Milwaukee Dance Department’s new winter concert need such sharing. They’ve been created with the students by faculty artists Daniel Burkholder, Maria Gillespie and Simone Ferro, and by guest D. Sabela Grimes, a leading hip-hop fusion artist from the University of Southern California.
Burkholder’s A Dance for my Daughter questions how to raise a daughter today and incorporates written passages by the performers and by poet Nicole Blackman. Gillespie is thinking of climate catastrophe and a remerging nuclear arms race in Histories for an Apocalypse, with stories from the lives of her young performers keeping hope and possibility alive. Ferro continues her collaborative work with dance students, upper-level architecture students and members of the Sherman Park neighborhood community to address such issues as the right to have a home and the indiscriminate rental practices that have fragmented some Milwaukee neighborhood for decades. Grimes describes his Bubbling Utterance as “freestyle crowded with intent…that reflects the mindfulness needed to formulate and utter a word…to bear witness and respond to injustice sincerely and with integrity.” (John Schneider)
7:30 p.m., Feb. 1-4 in the new Jan Serr Studio on the sixth floor of Kenilworth Square East, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For tickets visit uwm.edu/arts/events/.
Anna in the Tropics
Seat of Our Pants Readers Theatre Troupe presents an “enhanced staged reading” (as the troupe’s L. Mark Flagg puts it) of Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics—a collaborative effort being undertaken with Milwaukee Entertainment Group. This will actually be a two-part program—and here’s where the music part comes in. Things start off with mood-setting (and certainly mood-enhancing) live Latin music from the excellent UW-Milwaukee musicians Elena Abend (piano) and Orlando Pimentel (clarinet). They’ll “present several sparkling original works by Latin American composers,” Flagg says. And, during the play’s reading, “live interludes integral to the script of music by Cuban composers [will be] delivered by world-renowned classical guitarist Rene Izquierdo—also of the Peck School of the Arts.” (John Jahn)
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Feb. 1-3 at UWM Kenilworth 508 Theater, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For tickets, visit brownpapertickets.com and search event “3210528.”
