How great that UW-Milwaukee’s dance students have the opportunity to perform work so close to their skin, work they’ve helped make and can present with transparent honesty. Being in the room with such dancing never gets old. And in the new, still-developing Jan Serr Studio of the university’s Kenilworth Square East building, where the dance department’s Winterdances: Transit was presented last week, you could see right into the dancers’ eyes. It made for an emotional night.
The relationship between the department and the local dance community is profound. Faculty members belong to professional companies and students make their mark in community shows between classes. Some of them graduate into local companies or start new ones. The department’s major annual showcases, Winterdances and Springdances, give all of them opportunities to test ideas and lets audiences join the growth processes. (I’m not sure what it means for the future that almost all the dancers were women.)
Guest choreographer d. Sabela Grimes, a multidisciplinary artist from L.A., worked with UWM and Danceworks artist Gina Laurenzi and the students to premiere a hip-hop fusion style dance, “Bubbling Utterance,” for which he also composed music. Never predictable, surprisingly tender for the style yet always with some renegade movement happening, it was body language spoken with integrity meant to foster that practice as a way of life.
The Milwaukee choreographers created works far more concrete. Artistic director and department chair Simone Ferro spoke of hope in her curtain speech. Hope was manifest all night in the excellence of the dancing and in the very fact of art-making. It became an overt subject of Ferro’s “North of the Park,” as dancers spoke the words and embodied the nostalgia, passion and vision of Sherman Park residents for their neighborhood. In a brilliant design by Ferro, Denis Kavanagh and Mischa Premeau, sets of lockers represented homes. The UWM Institute of Chamber Music provided powerful accompaniment.
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Andy Miller and Kristin Olson performed Miller’s stirring score for Daniel Burkholder’s beautiful “A dance for my daughter.” Andrea Burkholder recorded a spoken accompaniment listing these parents’ hopes for their child, very sensitive to our time. The dancers are daughters. Their lives are at stake. All lives are at stake in Maria Gillespie’s “Histories for an Apocalypse,” an epic on immanent climate and nuclear disaster too big to describe. Is hope rational? Perhaps, since we have art to speak truth and inspire action.
