Photo Credit: Kym McDaniel
The site of Landing Sites was overwhelming. The audience at UW-Milwaukee’s 2019 spring dance concert was seated facing the great two-storied window that is the entire south wall of the sixth-floor studio of the university’s building on Prospect and Kenilworth. The concert’s 7:30-9:30 p.m. running time meant that we watched dusk turn to night over the lower East Side and distant Downtown, the streetlamps brighten, lights in the windows of high rises multiply, the gas company’s flame burn, the reflections of countless automobile headlights streak the street as rain fell. The dances were moody, so lighting designer Ellie Rabinowitz kept things mostly dim and dark-colored, allowing a dual focus outdoors and onstage. The city was part of the beauty and intellectual impact of each dance. Choreographers grouped the student dancers at the windows in provocative ways, had them dance on the ledge that runs beneath the glass, or simply stand, their backs to us, watching the city, our true landing site.
The dances were harder to access. Maria Gillespie’s Wild Gods and Daniel Burkholder’s There is so much sea, so little land were for me the richest in meaning and visual beauty. Gillespie’s featured haunting full-head masks by Shannon Massman: deer, fox, rabbit and bird. These were worn in different passages by each of eight dancers. The glowing, rainy city behind became a land where young folk of various ancestries examined their relationship to nature, history and mystery, against moving mystical music by bassist Barry Paul Clark and drummer Devin Drobka.
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Burkholder’s dancers, dressed in white (Lisa Schobert costumed every dance), dropped armfuls of crushed white paper that smothered the dance floor. Dancers slowed, crawled and were buried in the debris, bonded by it, too. Somehow, they’d make ground to stand like ghosts or beautiful sculptures. Well-spoken recorded poetry (“There’s nothing as complex or as simple as rain.”) encouraged personal interpretation. I saw the trash as greenhouse gases, rising seawater, environmental degradation.
Mair Culbreth’s dance also had me worried for the futures of the young performers, trembling, running, falling and climbing on architectural constructions by Nicole Bauguss. Gina Laurenzi’s dancers landed in apartment-like interiors by Tony Lyons; hands were wrung, live and on video, but the dancing was jazzy and experimental like the accompanying music by Chicago’s Twin Talk. And in Melanie George’s work, the vintage jazz stylings of Parker, Gillespie and Mingus were smartly embodied. These kids can swing.
