Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
Danceworks Performance Company is no more; long live Danceworks Performance MKE. The artists we’ve come to admire from the groundbreaking former company are joined now by dancers and choreographers skilled in a full range of styles. Accompanied by the invaluable Tontine Ensemble string quartet, the new company made its debut on Thursday, Nov. 7, with a wonderful, one-night-only, site-specific “evening of dance, music and mingling” in the lobby and galleries of Saint Kate—The Arts Hotel.
“The most important thing,” Artistic Director Dani Kuepper told me in an earlier conversation, “is that we’ve made this shift strategically to uplift the work at Danceworks and make it fuller.” This event, titled “Revealing the Eclectic Body,” was designed to introduce the new company and to show how this change can bring not just new looks but new meaning to the work.
Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
Kuepper hoped that audience members would talk with the dancers and musicians during the two-hour event, which was structured to allow for conversation. “The way to broaden support for the arts in Milwaukee,” she said, “is to let people understand how the life of an artist works. These people work a variety of jobs to pay the bills. They’re brilliant, they could probably go into corporate jobs and make six-figure salaries, but they believe this is a way to make a difference in the world. They’re committed to making the community better.”
I hope those conversations happened. In any case, I wanted to share Kuepper’s words, along with these from Danceworks CEO Deborah Farris’ welcoming talk: “The art connects us all.” A mix of races, ethnicities and genders, the new members are Katelyn Altmann, Alisha Jihn, Nekea Leon, Ivy Robertson, Jasper Sanchez, Gabi Sustache, Angela Weidner and Joshua Yang. They join Melissa Anderson, Kim Johnson, Liz Licht, Gina Laurenzi, Elizabeth Roskopf, Christal Wagner, Zach Schorsch, Maggie Seer and Andrew Zanoni.
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Wonderful in concept, it’s even better in reality. Against dramatic, reverberant phrases by Tontine violinist Allen Russell, the dancers gradually entered from both sides of the wide landing on the hotel’s grand staircase. Structured by Kuepper but with movements created by each dancer according to her, his or their vision, they slowly descended, dancing and posing like sculptures, growing in number until they danced among us on the ground floor. Then we wandered at will, finding dancers and musicians performing all over the place, just as Saint Kate envisioned it.
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