“The world is made of stories, not atoms,” said Betty Salamun, founder and director of the 43-year-old DanceCircus in her welcoming speech for Monarchs, Mounds, Migrations, the new performance collaboration presented last weekend at Next Act Theatre. It was an evening of storytelling, music, movement, costumes and ceremony. The show proposed a parallel between the migrations of monarch butterflies and those of peoples ancient and contemporary.
The performance was heavy on spoken text. One of the many ideas raised is that migration is the natural human condition. I’m not sure what to make of that in the face of global climate catastrophe. The world is made of atoms, too. But this show was meant to comfort us in that respect, I think.
A giant standing slab on stage was dressed to alternately represent an iceberg and a Mexican mountain, the end point of the monarchs’ four-generations long circular journey on the North American continent. The Ice Ages, the show reminded us, were not the end of life on earth, and monarchs outsmarted the poisoned northern milkweed to make it home. Those hopeful events inspired the show’s happy ending danced to Latin beats by the all-women, intergenerational Panadanza Dance Company.
Midway through the 70-minute performance, Salamun demonstrated her choreographic approach. She danced a series of gestural movements, dramatic but opaque. She then told aloud the story of her immigrant grandparents’ journey to Milwaukee while repeating the dance, each movement now explained by the spoken narrative. Together, text and movement had an impact. Having dedicated her life to this work, Salamun has a warmly compelling onstage presence.
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So does Karlies Kelly, founder and director of Panadanza. A native of Panama, Kelly recounted her own episodic immigration story in a ceremonial performance with a Panamanian flag for set dressing. Dance, she made clear, has been essential to her in this journey. Her piece was greatly lifted by the haunting original music of Ana Paula Soares, the show’s associate director.
Soares’ music also graced the sorrowful immigration tale of Milwaukee poet alida cardos whaley, a Mayan immigrant. Sensitive conga drumming by Sherice Oju Charleston beautifully partnered poet Mama Akua Paulette Bangura’s story of the disease and racism that beset her as she emigrated to Chicago and Milwaukee from Ghana. Bangura ended her troubling tale with a call for African people to heal America.
Mark Wooldrage moved easily from cello to ukulele to flute to percussion, playing all of them beautifully. The charismatic young poet Kavon Cortez-Jones has a great future ahead of him. Michaele Chaigneau-Norton choreographed the most interesting dance piece. Each dancer arrived onstage with an individual movement vocabulary. Dancers learned, or sadly didn’t, to expand their own possibilities in reaction to each immigrant’s arrival.
