Outside ballet and hip-hop, Milwaukee has only three professional male dancers at the moment, by my count. Of that group, Dan Schuchart has had the greatest impact on the city’s modern dance scene via his decade-long career as a dancer and, more recently, a choreographer with Wild Space Dance Company. Monica Rodero, his partner in life and art, has the identical résumé. Last spring, they earned MFAs in experimental choreography from the University of California-Riverside. Now they’re celebrating their return to Milwaukee’s dance scene with Duetted/Connected , a matched set of concerts premiered at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in August in anticipation of this homecoming.
“ Duetted is a little like a greatest-hits concert sprinkled with personal favorites,” Schuchart said. It includes selected pieces from the couple’s body of original dances as well as works by “our favorite choreographers Debra Loewen, Susan Marshall and Suniti Dernovsek.” Loewen, founding artistic director of Wild Space Dance Company, is the couple’s longtime friend and mentor. She took elements from works they’ve made together over 10 years to fashion “Some Years After,” a good-humored look at the vicissitudes of any long relationship.
Dernovsek is a Milwaukeean and former Wild Space colleague. Now co-director of bobbevy Dance Company in Portland, Ore., she came home to reset a 2013 duet called “This Is How We Disappear” on her old friends.
Marshall was in residence with the UW-Milwaukee dance department and the couple studied with her company in New York. They asked her for a dance. She gave them “Sound” from her celebrated 2006 work Cloudless and oversaw their final rehearsals.
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Connected is an audience-interactive solo by Schuchart using text, movement, improvised structures and interactive tasks. He describes it as “a new way for me to work. I lay out and question my creative process for and with the audience.” In just under an hour, he’ll build a community with an audience limited to 25 people. Everyone will dance.
Duetted will be performed at 5 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 22 and 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 23; and Connected will be performed at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 22 and 3 p.m. Nov. 23 at Danceworks Studio Theatre, 1661 N. Water St. Tickets are $15, or $25 for the double feature. Call 414-277-8480 ext. 6025 or visit danceworksmke.org.
