Of Dreams and Shadows

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Dawn Springer

Image from video by Kym McDaniel

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 string quartet. The piece features an improvised and through-composed score and movement inspired by visual representations of music, as well as the evolutionary power of dreaming.

Guest Dawn Springer will re-make her “Dreams of Flight” with DPC members. This unique offering features no musical cues, giving the audience the opportunity to examine “the audible footsteps of the dancers and the internal rhythm of the piece that the movement creates.”

Fellow guest Kym McDaniel integrates film and live dance for her piece. The work employs upward-pointing lighting instruments and dramatic ceiling shadows to evoke “limbs swimming in ink.”

DPC company member Chrystal Wagner is involved in creating two pieces. The first includes Wagner’s other project, Cadence Collective, spotlighting interviews collected at the Shorewood Senior Resource Center. The interviews, she says, cast footsteps, shadows and whispers as “this distant memory that you can kind of remember but in the meantime you’re actually trying to forget things that happened in the past.” Wagner’s other work is a “devil dance” with music by the Punch Brothers.

Finally, DPC artist Gina Laurenzi addresses the theme of shadows through a ghostly dueting technique in which pairs of dancers embody humans and their embellished shadows.

See Danceworks’ Facebook page for sneak peek videos from the show.

Footsteps, Shadows and Whispers runs Nov. 5-8 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. For tickets call 414-278-0765 or visit nextact.org.