Photo Credit: James Tomasello
Hyperlocal MKE’s music and dance improvisations, which happen just three or four times a year at changing sites, are among my favorite performance events. The 22nd show took place on Sunday in the Jan Serr Studio, where late-afternoon sunshine flooded the performance space with gorgeous backlight and sidelight through the giant window that serves as the backdrop. The theme for this show was the word “nexus,” focusing the connection among the performers that’s essential to creating a fully lived, wordless, hour-long improvisation. Like nature, its existence is its meaning. It unfolds. There’s nothing simple about that.
Through the years, the casts have been flexible. Sunday’s show was co-created by five choreographer-dancers: co-founder Maria Gillespie; original cast member Joelle Worm; longtime member Dan Schuchart; and more recent members Mair Culbreth and Alfonzo Cervera. All are celebrated dancemakers who are well into adulthood and brilliant movers in full command of their bodies. It was also co-created by four superb composer-musicians: violinist Allen Russell; cellist Pat Reinholz; percussionist Andy Miller; and bassist Barry Clark—masters of their instruments and comfortably avant-garde. These nine performers met three times before the performance to map out a basic structure and practice improvising together in order to heighten their knowledge of each other’s creative personalities.
The musicians took their places across the upstage edge of the playing space. The dancers entered and exited from the sides and assembled in every kind of pairing, but most often as a group of five. What do they respond to as they improvise? To one another, of course: composer to composer, choreographer to choreographer, composer to choreographer and vice versa. They respond to space with movement and to silence with sound—to tempo, to volume, to speed—and above all to the energy created by sounds, sights, movement and physical contact.
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They go for broke right from the start; the impact is exhilarating. Over time, they grow even freer, and the performances deepen. Playful or meditative explorations become something holy in the making and breaking of human connection; in the giving of oneself to others with complete vulnerability. It’s not a music concert or a dance performance; it’s an image of society. The audience is a vital part of it. Everyone is equal; there’s no leader. It fosters connectivity while heightening individuality and embraces the idiosyncratic while demonstrating courage, tenderness, unexpected creativity, joy and love. It’s a true democracy that works to everybody’s benefit.
