Image courtesy Danceworks
Danceworks Performance MKE 2021-22
“It was a terrifying, wild ride,” choreographer Christal Wagner told us in her welcome speech at the Danceworks Studio Theatre on opening night of the world premiere of her first full length dance as the new artistic director of Danceworks Performance MKE, the school’s venerable professional dance troupe. She couldn’t have made Fight or Flight she said, without the help of the performers.
Wagner is a young woman and a superb modern dance artist. Over the last year and a half, she’d experienced pandemic-induced symptoms shared by many of us, including memory issues and chronic pain. When no medical explanation would serve, she began to study the workings of the human nervous system. She brought what she discovered to the dancers, who joined her in examining their own physical responses to stress and their methods for healing. Fight or Flight directly shares what they’ve learned. It’s a teaching dance, aimed at helping us find equilibrium.
Wagner ended her welcome by leading us in a breathing exercise: inhale for four counts, hold for four, and exhale for six. The performance, she said, would end with the dancers practicing that, and we were welcome to join from our seats.
The audience sits on four sides of the intimate space for this show. Through short video lessons on strategically positioned monitors and, above all, through ever-evolving episodes of dance theatre – and sometimes both at once -- we learned the importance of breathing (or crying). It doesn’t sound like much, and that’s the point. Our physical responses to stress are automatic. Our minds are elsewhere.
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Completing the Cycle
I learned that my thoughts and imagination can trigger the same physical responses as an actual event. I learned that the stress cycle is as follows: a trigger (imagined or real), the physical response (real), and recuperation (the part we don’t have time for and ignore). The need for recuperation, and the fact that we can help one another reach the cycle’s completion, constitutes the heart of this hour-long dance piece. I was breathing better by the end.
The performance is well-served by Sam Mullooly’s expansive, ethereal electronic score, which often incorporates wordless singing. It shares time and space with the dance and is another kind of deep breathing. Appropriately titled The Balance, this is its world premiere, too.
Much of the show is dance mime. It includes fist fights, characters doubled up in grief, stamping, shaking or frozen with anxiety, as well as the gift of hugs. There are also elevating passages of free-flowing modern dance. It all makes sense in context.
Danceworks Performance MKE aims to represent a broad spectrum of Milwaukee’s population, and Fight or Flight capitalizes on the individual character of each dancer. Each is dressed in their own way. Even masked, each is a strong presence. Some are more seasoned, more flexible, capable of freer movement, and that’s nice; but together they represent more of us.
Performances continue Nov. 7-9 at Danceworks, 1661 N. Water St. Call 414-277-8480 or visit danceworksmke.org
