“This is how artists are activists,” writes dance artist Maria Gillespie about her multi-disciplinary performance venture, The Collaboratory, “because they make new worlds to present convincing, beautiful, multi-faceted and poetically rich alternatives to the status quo.” Her experimental performance installation, Between Constructions of Desire, a year-long effort with six collaborators, made a good case for that claim.
Those collaborators included well-known dancers Katelyn Altmann, Amanda Laabs and Annie Peterson, all prodigious BFA students and research fellows at UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts; the invaluable experimental composer/musician C. Olivia Valenza; the visual artist Glenn Williams, an associate professor of art and head of UWM’s sculpture program; and construction, lighting and rigging specialist Mischa Premeau.
Valenza began by dragging a heavy chime along the floor of the space, revealing the room’s rich acoustics. As usual, her accompaniment on cello, clarinet and electronics was preternaturally evocative throughout the performance. The dancers followed a score of actions consisting of wordless movement and the manipulation of William’s art objects: a clear glass ramp with space underneath to curl up in, two small glass cubes that could be carried or stood on, an expansive plastic tarp covered with empty colored eggshells, and a number of long thick ropes fastened to the studio’s two-story high metal beams. These were clamped to waistband harnesses worn by the dancers. They limited the amount of space the young women could transverse before growing taut and restricting them.
Extra drama was provided by the room itself, the large Jan Serr Studio in UWM’s Kenilworth Square East. The entire southern wall is a window two stories high, offering a panoramic view of the East Side all the way to Downtown. A couple of diagonal metal beams impose themselves dynamically across part of the windows. The eastern wall is also glass with a view to Lake Michigan.
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You’re free to interpret the action. The women entered on hands and knees. Petersen placed a cube on Laabs’ back and a slab of glass on Altmann’s, then curled in fetal position on the glass as Altmann continued to crawl. The women slid beautifully in many ways down the low ramp and seemed safe in its underside hideaway. They crawled and walked on the eggshells, gingerly crushing them under hands, knees and feet. They pulled with and against each other but mostly they pulled against the ropes’ restrictions. Finally, they met in a hug.
