Photo Credit: Paul Ruffolo
Only a couple of secrets are told in Danceworks Performance Company’s Secrets From the Wide Sky, a beautifully constructed, nine-episode experiment in dance, music and spoken text performed by nine adults and five teenagers with composer Allen Russell live on violin and electronics. The dancers’ anonymous secrets, gathered by director Dani Kuepper, were the seeds. They’re mostly fears: does the fact that I don’t clean my car or take care of my health mean I’m not a good person?; will my kids learn what I’ve done to put food on the table?; will I find a mate?; will I get into college?; do I have the strength to finish this dance?
As it turns out, specific secrets aren’t the subjects of the work that premiered last Saturday. Rather, it’s the moral and psychological aspects of hiding and revealing secrets. In this time of intensifying Washington investigations, widespread access to all we’ve ever put online and confusion about the very definition of truth, it’s a good subject. How honest should we be? What’s the cost of keeping secrets?
One idea repeated in poet Jennifer Kohnhorst’s clear-eyed text, threaded through the show and well-spoken by the dancers, is that we’d better choose wisely to whom we tell our secrets. Another is that telling lightens their weight; freedom comes with the ability to trust. All of that was palpable in this performance. Of course, the desire to be known and the attendant dangers are part of the art-making process, a meta-subject. Kuepper describes the work in her program notes as a study in empathy.
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Secrets opens on Colin Gowronski’s artfully lighted dining room and a family of nine distrustful adults. Dancer Christal Wagner speaks of “the elephant in the room.” Individuals leave the table, dance and return in tense movements. A secret is told, a bombshell that angers Mom (Liz Tesch) who leaves, giving rise to another provocative Kohnhorst refrain: “You can tell so much about a person from the way they leave you.”
It’s very good dancing. Kuepper credits the performers as co-choreographers. They include company members Kim Johnson, Gina Laurenzi, Licht and Wagner; guest artists Elizabeth Roskopf, Zach Schorsch, Maggie Seer, Tesch and Morgan Williams; and Danceworks Youth Company members Finley Gresnick, Olivia Johnson, Thalicia Melendez, Naila Reeves-Sanchez and Julia Schuessler. Roskopf and Williams were especially striking in a dark, tender Wagner-choreographed episode that required trust from the dancers.
Performances continue April 19-21 at Danceworks Studio Theatre, 1661 N. Water St. Visit danceworksmke.org or call 414-277-8480 x6025.
