Danceworks Performance MKE Works to Weather the Storms

Expand

Image by Christal Wagner Photography

Promotional image for Danceworks' 'The 8th House'

Promotional image for Danceworks' 'The 8th House'

For years, the wide, two-stories-high, church-length hall of Calvary Presbyterian Church at Wisconsin Avenue and Tenth Street has provided an alternative performance space for smaller professional dance, music and theater groups. For Danceworks Performance MKE, it’s a better space than the company’s longtime home on Water Street. Rising rent and other costs last year led the Danceworks organization to move its entire operation—offices, classrooms, rehearsal spaces—to the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, a gamble of the sort that might inspire tarot readings or a look to the alignment of the planets.

“The 8^th House,” DPMKE’s spring concert, played with ways, occult and otherwise, to manage transformation and rebirth. “These days many of us feel like we are holding on for dear life,” reads Artistic Director Christal Wagner’s program notes, “as the world spins through cosmic expanses of stardust and black holes—paying rent, hoping for a break, and wondering if we can weather yet another crisis.”

In addition to those anxieties, I attended the show’s closing performance in the midst of the dangerous blizzard last Sunday night. As I walked from my car, a ferocious gust of wind stole my hat irretrievably. But the welcome I received in that hall, with Colin Gawronski’s ever-lovely lighting, and the two long curving rows of audience seating, on level with the dancers, provided respite from all the storms.

The concert included 12 meditative works individually choreographed by Wagner and her four-member company creative team, with a gymnastic comic 13th piece by guest artist David Roman.

A movie theatre size projection screen stood at the front end of the performance space, creating a makeshift foyer between the front doors and the dance floor. There, audience members could, if they chose, have a tarot reading from an expert. I should have asked how I could find my hat, but I was too unnerved to think of that.

Dramatic Imagery

The film screen was a great addition to the concert. Each dance opened with its title and dramatic imagery projected. Then, when blank and lighted from behind, it was a site for dancers’ shadows. For example, in Eclipse Season, choreographer Ashley Ray Garcia’s solo dance for Halle Silvertson, we saw the earth’s shadow darken the moon in a projection, followed by the dancer turned into a shadow on the screen. She soon reappeared, dancing up a storm in bright light.  

The concert opened with Without Asking Again, Wagner’s piece for five colleagues set to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” A happy family of friends sought answers from a Magic 8-Ball. Dancer Cuauhtli Ramirez Castro was especially crushed by the answer, and dancer Gabi Sustache-Turner gifted the lousy toy to an audience member.

Set to a contemporary Polish folk song, Garcia’s Razem gave us the apprentice company as heavy-hearted immigrants, I think, straining to pull their bodies forward with their hands flat against the stage floor, rolling, crashing, reaching out and helping one another lovingly enough to bring tears to my eyes.

With the uncapitalized title what the body keeps, Zoe Mei Glise’s choreographed solo for her colleague Greta Jenkins opened with a stormy sky flashing onscreen, and Jenkins violently struggling on the floor. She rose in convulsive movements, faster and wilder, tugging at her clothing, falling backwards, wrenching her body around the floor and finally to stillness. “The body remembers first, explains later…” Glise writes in her program note, “…what loss does when it stays.”

What Makes Us Divine, Ramirez Castro’s self-choreographed dance/prayer followed. As we traveled down a wintry onscreen forest path, he sang in his native Spanish “I come to offer my heart.” Then Human, a spoken poem by Sophia Kai with lines like “we cross oceans for love” filled the hall. He did a backbend almost to the floor, covered the stage with remarkable spins, urgently danced on his knees and then really cut loose, wild and freeform, probably improvised, exhausting himself, but then singing again, recovering strength as he backed up a stairway to darkness.

Proximity To Self, Glise’s quiet, hopeful dance for herself, Jenkins, Sustache-Turner, and Katelyn Altmann represented, she writes “a flicker of revelation that passes quickly.” It brought on intermission.

Serious, honest works by Ramirez Castro, Wagner, Garcia, and Glise followed intermission, leading to Katelyn Altmann’s two climactic contributions. In Plumage, her spellbinding solo merger with animal spirits, Altmann danced with long bird feathers extending straight from both arms until they’d fallen or been plucked. Her fallingFROMwithinTHEascent set Glise, Jenkins, and apprentices Dianne Kotsonis and Rae Zimmerli against the labyrinth design in the woodwork of the hall’s floor. It “asks us,” she writes, “to lose our way just enough to discover something waiting at the center.”

Roman’s satirical Fame, built on the company to David Bowie’s song, was the perfect ending. What is fame compared with all of that?