A Dance Critic's Story

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Photo courtesy of John Schneider

My story begins with another epidemic, that of polio in 1951. I was a victim at the age of 3, paralyzed from the waist down and hospitalized for a month, I’m told. One day my mom arrived at my hospital room and found me standing in bed, holding myself up by the bedrail. It was the start of an unexpected recovery, a miracle in my mom’s eyes. I had to slowly rebuild strength and agility in my legs, and a doctor suggested dancing lessons as a possible aid. Mom, who always said that the arts make life worth living, welcomed that idea. I started lessons at age 5 in a dancing school in my hometown of Fond du Lac. I loved the musicality, the physicality, and the delight others took from my dancing. I continued ballet, modern and tap lessons year-round until high school, enduring the teasing and adoring the acclaim as I was featured increasingly in recitals and competitions. My life’s course was born from that epidemic.

With high test scores, I was deemed gifted by my Catholic grade school, so the nuns, my teachers, urged me toward the priesthood. A beloved uncle of mine was a Capuchin monk and the first recipient of a Ph.D. in that religious order’s history. I was to follow in his footsteps. I spent my four high school years in a Capuchin seminary. The monks loved theater. We did lots of it. It was an easy shift from dance for me and an important one. Meaning was foregrounded. Human experience was analyzed, expressed in words and argued. Plays, I decided, were better than sermons and at least as life-changing; and music and dance were often included.

My other love was writing. I enrolled in English at St. Norbert College, but by sophomore year I’d switched to Theater. The department was new and small. I was encouraged to do everything, including lead a one-credit workshop in physical theatre. My heroes were Jerzy Grotowski of the highly athletic Polish Lab Theater, and the physical political theatre ensemble The Living Theatre. In both cases, the focus was on the actors’ bodies as conveyors of meaning, far more Dionysian than Apollonian. The first full-length play I devised was entirely wordless movement and vocalizing. Premiered at St. Norbert in my senior year, it toured to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where it was embraced by a theater and dance department eager to support experiment. That school was the birthplace, after all, of Theatre X.

So I moved to Milwaukee after graduation in 1970 and joined that young, loosely organized, experimental collective. For a living, I taught dance and music at an independent elementary school on the North Side, run by Capuchin’s and the Little Sisters of St. Francis. I modeled nude at Layton School of Art, which was dancing of a sort. But Theatre X became my life. The handful of us who stayed with it earned enough to almost cover basic living costs. Circumstances led to my becoming resident playwright and, gradually, artistic leader. I wrote gobs of words but the dominant aesthetic remained physical and musical, even when there were no songs or instruments.

Change the World

We were unbelievably successful; one might say, miraculously successful. Internationally successful, but that’s another story. As a young artist, when asked about Theatre X’s mission, I would say it was “to change the world.” I grew less glib as I began to learn how much I had to learn, how much I had to risk, how hard I had to work to make a difference. I think we were successful because our primary goals were to serve the art form and the city in all of its communities. We opened up the landscape of professional performing arts in Milwaukee.

My 34 years in Theatre X gave me deep respect and compassion for artists who originate work, as all dance companies do. It heightened my appreciation for risk-taking, for the constant pushing of boundaries while maintaining a steadfast love for your collaborators and your audience.

Theatre X closed shop in 2004. I was teaching theatre and dance classes at Marquette part time and helping high school students, mostly kids of color, create and present original theater and dance performances for their peers in a program I’d founded called Project Non-Violence. My friend Dave Luhrssen, arts and entertainment editor for the Shepherd Express, often asked me to review local theater. My knee-jerk response was always no, they’re all friends. One day he caught me in a more thoughtful mood. What about dance, he asked? I said, let me think.

I thought about the work I’d done for nearly two decades for the Theater and Inter-arts Programs of the National Endowment for the Arts. When I wasn’t on a panel myself, making recommendations on who should receive public funds, I traveled the country meeting with artists and artistic directors applying for grants and seeing their work. My role was to represent them, as fully I could, to that year’s panel. I saw myself as a bridge between the artists and panelists. So perhaps I could become, I thought, a bridge between Milwaukee dance artists and the community. I’d skip the thumbs-up-thumbs-down thing. Honest, careful description and thoughtful, informed analysis are respectable critical methods. So, I said yes.

The first requirement was to talk repeatedly with the artists to understand their goals. I approached dance as I did theater, looking for meaning and purpose. I sought to give readers more ways to watch a dance. There wasn’t much dance to watch in town when I started. The dance community has grown by leaps and bounds and has helped make Milwaukee a world class arts city. Now it’s highly imperiled, of course.

One effect of the current pandemic, I’ve read, is the re-emergence of widespread polio.  But who knows what miracles are possible? Whatever paths performing artists take, my task will be to find words to help illuminate them.

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