Danceworks Performance MKE Honors 25 Years with ‘I Am Because You Are …’

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Danceworks 'I Am Because You Are'

Danceworks Performance MKE 'I Am Because You Are'

Last weekend’s opening performance of I Am Because You Are … began with a champagne toast to honor the 25th anniversary of Danceworks’ professional dance company, now named Danceworks Performance MKE (DPMKE). Christal Wagner, beginning her second year as artistic director, led the toast from the grand staircase in the lobby of the Baumgartner Center for Dance, Milwaukee Ballet’s home, where the performance was held.

The toast, she told us, was to Milwaukee. She read to us from a 15-year-old story in Dance magazine about dance companies across America. The reporter had interviewed her at age 22 as the newest member of the Danceworks professional troupe. She’d said she was thrilled by this step toward her dream as a New York City dancer. Then, lifting her glass to us, Wagner asserted there’s no place she’d rather be dancing than here. She and Danceworks are because we are.

We took our seats, and the program opened with a new film by Wagner, a short documentary titled “Lineage: A Tribute to Our Origins.” Clips of performances from the company’s history were intercut with loving testimonies from some of the dancers who’d performed them. I remembered with pleasure the ones I’d seen.

The film gave the audience a lens for the dances that followed. We understood that we were watching dancers’ lives in the making. Like the artists in the film, these dancers tonight will think back to this show and all that went into its making. So for me, the dancers were the focus and the point.

Of the five dances in the program, revivals of Wagner’s Sojourn from 2007 and Gina Laurenzi’s from 2013 Beneath—both of them solos—excited me most. Among the group dances, Tanya Vander Hoop’s When Can I Be? and Wagner’s Chaos Theory were premieres, and Dawn Springer’s Dreams of Flight a revival from 2010. I loved the solo passages, and moments in group scenes when a dancer was given special focus. There was lots of that. Each of the program’s 13 dancers will look wonderful in film clips at the company’s 50th anniversary celebration.

Gabi Sustache, hypnotically gripping as the sole dancer in Laurenzi’s surreal Beneath, had danced as a five-year old in one of the film clips we’d just seen. She’s the daughter of a founding member. She’d never danced this particular work until now, though. She was clearly exploring it, savoring it, bringing her whole life in art to it. It’s a dance that takes place beneath the surface—whether of water or consciousness.

Nekea Leon’s solo performance of Wagner’s Sojourn was just as intoxicating. Her face serene and sometimes trance-like; her body everywhere, immensely physical in all positions at all levels, and in multiple dance styles combined and set to music that was tribal in the biggest sense.

All three group dances were explosive, very fast moving, ever-changing visions of a true dance community. Those I know best—Katelyn Altmann, Cuauhtil Ramirez Castro, Ivy Robertson, Elizabeth Roskopf, Maggie Seer, Sustache and Leon—were at their best, along with newer members Greta Jenkins, Jessica Lueck, Kaitlyn Moore, Tessa Ritchey, Halle Sivertson, and Ashley Ray Garcia. Each dance was so complex and physically challenging, I was amazed the dancers could remember them, and have the strength and stamina to give two back-to-back performances each night as scheduled.

I wish a happy anniversary to Danceworks Performance MKE. Thanks for staying in Milwaukee, Christal.