Every summer, Danceworks produces an influential research laboratory for performing artists. The only requisite is that the project be a cross-disciplinary collaboration; hence the program’s title, “Art to Art.” For the first time this summer dance was not a required element. Each year, a broad theme is chosen to aid selection; this summer’s theme is “True Stories.” The process includes showings (which I attended for this preview) of raw works-in-progress to experts for feedback. It ends with public performances of these new attempts at new expressions of what it is to be alive today. This year’s show takes place Friday and Saturday, Aug. 1-2, at the Danceworks Studio Theatre.
Women’s History is a stirring music theater piece by composer Deanna Gibeau and writer Kristin Bayer. In unaccompanied, musically diverse movements with texts inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa and contemporary Pakistani women’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai, it invites identification with struggling women worldwide. It features an intergenerational all-female cast, including the UW-Washington County Women’s Choir, soloists, dancers and projected visual art.
Composer Neil Davis and his virtuosic, five-member Guitar Ensemble perform an oceanic jazz score through which poet Chad Piechocki weaves his spoken word memoir, Etymology of Desire or How I Want to Write a Piece About St. Valentine. The combination is nicely reminiscent of a beatnik jam session.
The separate realities of film and live performance are explored in two works. Choreographer Madeline Schoch and filmmaker Kym McDaniel focus on formal elements. Schoch explores flatness in her live dancing while McDaniel’s filmed imagery is vertiginous. McDaniel’s suspenseful soundtrack heightens the sense of a body in danger, suggesting personal content.
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In contrast, choreographer Devin Settle and filmmaker Sandy Manikowski focus on the contemporary ache for elusive space-time to breathe and find one’s self. Settle will dance in the here and now of the studio between filmed sequences taken during a recent train trip down the west coast in which she danced in expansive natural settings. Original music is by Milwaukee composers Alex Shah and Will Rose.
Choreographer Kelsey Lee and music designer Izaiah Ramirez made darkly comic dance theater of the universal experience of heartbreak. Choreographers Kyra Renee and Kaitlyn Hippe gathered a legion of artists for Pretty Thoughts , a film conceived with visual artist Chad Nelson. Every performance is a new true story discovered by the questing improvisational musicians and dancers of Enzo Collective.
Aug. 1-2 performances are at 7:30 p.m. Danceworks Studio is at 1661 N. Water St. For further information, call 414-277-8480 or visit danceworksmke.org.
