Photo Credit: Paul Ruffolo
Sarah Wilbur is a consummate theater artist. In her self-made, 45-minute, almost-solo performance “Disclosure Tactics,” the founding artistic director of Danceworks Performance Company easily commanded Next Act Theatre’s stage in a high-speed performance that seized the mind, provoked deep laughter and inspired the kind of genuine community formation among audience and artists that is the point and joy of live theater.
While dancing ferociously, Wilbur explained that in 2007 she moved to Los Angeles and met many women who once danced but had replaced it with gym workouts like “yoga booty ballet.” Milwaukee women, she saw now, were similarly inclined. Her unspoken suggestion was that women, once they age, won’t risk dancing’s bodily displays; one’s “worth,” in a sense, subjected to the measuring gazes of an audience. An expert comic, Wilbur made herself the brunt of the joke, the punk kid in sunglasses who doesn’t know when to stop. “Can you see me? Can you hear me? Just kidding,” she’d repeat anxiously.
She wanted to know our names. We had to spell them for her while she tried to dance a movement for each letter in the massive aural jumble that resulted. She charmed women in the audience into introducing themselves. She introduced the sound man. She packed the stage with very different, colorfully costumed Milwaukee women, each dancing her own dance, whatever her age or training. We sang, holding hands. No kidding.
Wilbur’s work was the inspiration for Women Who Dance, last weekend’s concert assembled by Dani Kuepper who succeeded Wilbur in 2007 as artistic director. Kuepper choreographed the concert’s joyful prologue “Pattern, Repattern, Unpattern, Repeat.” Against an amusing recording of a woman describing quilt making, we watched the skilled Danceworks women ensemble abandon itself to dance making.
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A fascinating piece by Danceworks company member Christal Wagner and her musician partners in the three-woman Cadance Collective followed on opening night. Flautist Emma Koi and cellist Alicia Storin improvised darkly against an uncanny film of Wagner alternately dancing and drowning. Cut to Wagner live onstage as if struggling to escape or embrace the dream. Next, Karlies Kelley’s Panadanza dancers showed us how Hispanic women boldly present themselves in dance as human folk and goddesses.
So what should we make of women who dance? Clowns, rebels, egoists, pioneers, people? Men, it seems, don’t risk such exposure at any age. Athletics, I guess, is the acceptable venue. Something to think about.
