Dancers Are Because Dancers Are

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Image courtesy Danceworks Performance MKE

Danceworks Performance MKE 'I Am Because You Are'

In a South African Bantu language, the word Ubuntu broadly translates as “humanity.” A more precise meaning for the philosophy it represents is “I am because you are, and you are because I am.” Edited to I Am Because You Are… it’s the title of the dance concert that will open the 25th anniversary season of Danceworks Performance MKE.

This is also Christal Wagner’s second season as the company’s artistic director. Last season, she focused on such mind-bending subjects as managing personal anxiety and the ways we sometimes label or otherwise diminish one another. I Am Because You Are… is a meditation on Ubuntu, the idea that communities create their members beings. It approaches this by examining the company’s human history through new works and new looks at older works by company choreographers Wagner and Gina Laurenzi, and guest choreographers Dawn Springer and Taryn Vander Hoop.

Vander Hoop is a Milwaukee native and former student of Danceworks Performance MKE’s long-serving, now retired, artistic director Dani Kuepper. “For me, the thing that’s really cool,” Wagner tells me, “is that when Taryn wanted to quit dancing back in high school, Dani – who was her dance teacher -- wrote her parents a personal letter saying don’t let Taryn quit dance. And then Taryn didn’t quit. She went on to UWM where Dani also taught, and got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and now has a dance company in Los Angeles, Summation Dance, and she’s a professor out there. So because one person said ‘don’t let this go,’ Taryn is now setting work on our company. I get emotional about it because it’s such a small world and we’re all influencing each other in these ways.”

“Ubuntu is meaningful to me,” she continues, “because I studied under Dani Kuepper for almost 20 years, in college and then as a professional, learning everything I know from her and not even understanding how much I learned from her in that time.”

25-Year History

Wagner is also a celebrated filmmaker, and this concert includes the premiere of her documentary on the company’s 25-year history. It features footage of early works and interviews with dancers from the company’s first years, including personal stories from Kuepper, co-founder Sara Wilbur, and Education Director Amy Brinkman.

“I asked them what it was like to start this back in the 1990’s,” Wagner explains, “and about some of the classic shows before my time, and how some of the bigger ideas started. Danceworks has this history of working with older populations. So before our 50+ classes and our Intergenerational Performance Company, there was the Wide Sky Project that Sara Wilbur started and Dani carried on – a legacy I’m now thinking about. I found an old brochure, maybe 2004-2005, when Sara Wilber had the Project perform at the Cabot Theatre. It said that over 100 community members were part of it.”

“These things are like little bread crumbs that have been left along the path,” she says, “And now I’m circling back to start the path again. I joined in year ten, so I’ve been around for fifteen years, which is crazy because it feels like such a short amount of time to have been part of something that feels so big.”

Wagner’s film should look great on the big screen that’s a feature at the Baumgartner Center for Dance, home to Milwaukee Ballet, where the show will be staged on November 12 and 13.

She’ll also premiere a live group dance “about the lineage that I have, all of the people I’ve personally learned from.” The music is by Milwaukee composer Michael Torke, who provided the music for a piece Wagner choreographed for Danceworks during her second season with the company. She describes that early work as minimalist, and this new one as “a little more dramatic, visceral and virtuosic, an ode to the lineage of modern dance that I studied throughout college.” The music is a chamber work in three movements by Torke, music that Wagner calls “lush and romantic, divinely complex and so opposite from the piece I made fourteen years ago.”

She’s also reset her first solo piece for the company on a much newer company dancer, Nekea Leon, for whom the piece is an entirely new experience. Likewise, the younger dancer Gabrielle Sustache will interpret one of the first solos that senior company member Gina Laurenzi ever choreographed for Danceworks, making this, too, a new experience for both dancer and choreographer.

The UWM dance faculty’s Dawn Springer, a frequent collaborator over the years, is revisiting her Dreams of Flight, a group piece she made for Danceworks in 2015 when the company had a very different composition. Every dancer in the recreation is working with her for the first time, allowing their lives to be touched. It’s Ubuntu in action.

Performances are Nov. 12 at 6 and 8:30 p.m., and Nov. 13 at 6 p.m. at the Baumgartner Center for Dance, 128 N. Jackson St. For information or tickets, visit danceworksmke.org or call the Danceworks box office at 414-277-8480.