Maybe it’s geography. Despite the title of this year’s spring concert by the UW-Milwaukee Dance Department, the student performers in the three premieres by Milwaukee choreographers almost never smiled. Yet I felt joy in watching them. The fourth piece, a short excerpt from a longer unseen work by guest choreographer Ana Maria Alvarez of Los Angeles, was joyous by design and left me empty.
A better explanation might be age and culture. Alvarez is founding choreographer of the Contra-Tiempo Urban Latin Dance Theatre in L.A. and the high-energy commitment of the dancers in her piece had many in the all-ages audience cheering on Saturday night. My problem was that I’ve enjoyed what I consider much better Afro-Caribbean hip-hop choreography by our hometown artists. And, more seriously, that the cheerful recitation by the dancers of a list of cross-cultural human rights (you have the right to be yourself, in summary), followed by some quiet encouraging words forced on representative audience members, seemed to me painfully inadequate to the inequality of suffering it’s meant to address. Others in the crowd, as I’ve said, seemed genuinely grateful.
Throughout the evening, two things continued to strike me: first, the care the department has for its students; and second, the difficult challenges we all face today—but perhaps the young most of all. The dances by Milwaukeeans Dawn Springer, Kym McDaniel and Dani Kuepper had in common a strenuous athleticism and a ferocious determination by the dancers to master difficult physical challenges as if they represented life challenges. The makeshift performance space the department created for the show in a wide, windowless, fallout shelter-like area of UWM’s Kenilworth Square East seemed appropriate.
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The dance/life metaphor was explicit in the well-shaped chaos of Kuepper’s piece, a take on so-called SMART goals advocated by strategic planners. A cast of 24 distinct individuals held their balance in many different, difficult ballet and yoga inspired poses while counting aloud to increasingly higher numbers. In voice-overs, they spoke of fears that they aren’t good enough, of the need to learn from failure, to work hard to improve their skills and to help one another. Springer had her dancers running, spinning and collapsing at almost superhuman speed and scale, while the fortitude required to execute McDaniel’s repeating movements left her dancers shuddering. The joy was that in all cases the students were there for one another, watching, insisting, supporting.
