Photo by Halle Sivertson
Out of Place - Elisabeth Roskopf
Out of Place
It began as a solo performance on an outdoor bridge in Milwaukee’s Davidison Park last October. The show was In Site: Cycles by Wild Space Dance Company, one of several professional companies that count on Elisabeth Roskopf’s work a dancer and choreographer.
Photo courtesy of Elisabeth Roskopf
Elisabeth Roskopf - Headshot
Elisabeth Roskopf
Then in late March came Out of Place, Roskopf’s full-length dance concert at the Danceworks Studio Theatre. She produced, directed, co-choreographed and performed it with dance artists who, like her, identify as transracial Asian American adoptees. Their need to understand and embrace that complexity was the dance work’s subject.
For Roskopf, the bridge in Davidson Park was a metaphor for the space between race and culture that constitutes her Korean American identity. It’s something she wants to learn more about, the better to help and inspire others. This show completes the work for her MFA thesis in dance from UWM.
While Out of Place began on that bridge, let’s hope it didn’t end that weekend at Danceworks Theatre. Roskopf and her artist team of Maree ReMalia, Zoe Mei Glise and Ailie Snyder are looking to tour it. Having seen it, I fully support their goal. Performance art needs performances. This was created in record time. It will grow if given the opportunity. It will tighten and heighten its contrasts. In subject, it’s like nothing I’ve seen. The show could foster valuable discussion and healing.
More than Entertainment
Roskopf and her team’s skills are obvious, but that’s never the point. This is more than entertainment. It’s an honest unpacking. And as the talk-back made clear, the audience was deeply moved.
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Roskopf explained to me last fall that “for her thesis research but also for my life research, it’s this question of how do I bridge the gap that’s creating a divide between my identity and history of heritage. It’s about discovering my sense of self and finding my place between the two cultures that I’m a part of.”
She’d been handed to a South Korean adoption agency at birth. It’s assumed that her family was too poor to keep her, and adoption was their answer. While a baby, she was delivered to a white Wisconsin family. She’s had some success in locating some Korean relatives. Last year, she traveled to her birthElplace for what contact was possible.
Out of Place is structured in two “chapters.” The first, Being on Our Own Journeys, opens with a film by Danceworks’ co-artistic director Christal Wagner, who took the plane with Roskopf to South Korea. To songs by contemporary South Korean women artists, we see Roskopf in a shower peeling a coating of caked-on whiteness from her skin, “to return to myself, whoever that old person was,” as we hear her say in voiceover. Next, she’s in South Korea, dancing on stones and bridges, running through woods and bamboo fields, eating Korean food and asking “what part of me is this? I was taken away.”
‘Collect Your Baggage’
Photo by Halle Sivertson
Out of Place - Elisabeth Roskopf
Out of Place - Solo
Then we meet the dancers live. “Please collect your luggage,” says an airport announcement in voiceover. One by one, each dancer’s suitcase descends via ropes from the ceiling. This is their arrival in America from Asia. What luggage are they carrying within? Each has her dance moment.
College student Ailie Snyder offers further answers in the show’s next segment, a lovely, melancholy solo about an identity crisis: “Am I enough?” they ask in a self-written voiceover. Then Zoe Glise, a well-known Milwaukee dancer, offers further questions. It’s inviting, graceful, precise dancing and she asks this killer question in voiceover: “Does my birth family remember that I turned 25 this year?”
Next comes a beautiful Roskopf-choreographed duet for Snyder and Glise to rainfall sounds and voiceover texts about grappling with differences from other school kids while growing up, but noting that “it’s hard to talk about being adopted without feeling you’re hurting your adoptive family.” They dance with boxes that seem heavy but prove empty.
Chapter 2, Discovering Who We Are, begins with 48-year-old Maree ReMalia flat on the floor holding flowers. A death image? She breaths into a nearby microphone and speaks live: “Time measured by breath.” She repeats that line while dancing a solo with stumbles and struggles.
The final soloist is Roskopf, who opens her suitcase. A beautiful Korean gown is inside. She covets it, but should she wear it? She trembles, beats the floor, dances with full-bodied power, but finally returns that luggage to its hook. It disappears above as she speaks her goodbye in Korean.
On a bridge like that in Davidson Park, ReMalia asked Roskopf: what’s your first memory? “Wanting to dance,” Roskopf answers. “In the deepest part of my heart, that’s where I feel my strength.”
All four dancers performed the final segment, Reclamation. They partner one another, become a community, cuddle in peace and love. This could be everyone’s story, I thought.
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