UW-Milwaukee’s dance department remains committed to providing its faculty with opportunities for risk-taking research and its students with cutting edge training. Those were the clear priorities last weekend in Winterdances 2016: Evolve As We Enter.
Maria Gillespie’s “Lines of Desire, Artifacts No. 21-24” opened the concert. The latest in her series exploring “what is or isn’t visible from our dancing,” Gillespie staged the dance to Fabio Altenbach’s rectangular projections of white light on a floor stretched with muslin like an unpainted canvas. Six dancers drew swirling lines on the muslin with black and red chalk as they rolled, stretched, curled, rose and fell. Their skin and clothing were soon smeared with chalk. Sensuous figures in this Pollack-like landscape, they marked and were marked in the process. Frames of light appeared around them, shrank or expanded in uncanny synchronicity almost at the audience’s feet.
By contrast, the women in Debra Loewen’s “We Have To Begin” seemed distant on the big stage. It took time to connect with their movements, which were personally expressive but abstract. Sense came with the recorded voice of writer I.F. Stone: “We share technology; we have to begin to think of ourselves as a family and enjoy our differences.” One dancer carried another like a child with arms around her mother’s neck, legs around her waist.
Melinda Jean Myers’ “dust in the shades” was cool and dark, like its title. Skateboarders sailed past a pile of bodies. Spirited young dancers announced their driver’s license stats and otherwise vied for uniqueness against a maximal soundscape created live by composer Tim Russell. The kids even drolly rehearsed the dance we were watching. Then, with a blackout, they jumped from the stage.
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Dani Kuepper’s absurdist “The Violence of Indifference” used a line from Neil Davis’ and Chad Piechocki’s music/poetry collaboration, performed last summer in Danceworks’ Art to Art program: “Three examples of her martyrdom.” To Davis’ music, the women performers placed chairs and sat as for a show. One began to hurl chairs across the stage in anger, another reordered them, others stacked them or stood on them. Someone collapsed; another tended the martyr’s body; another reorganized chairs only to see them sent flying again.
“Evolve As We Enter” by Amaniyea Payne of Chicago’s Muntu Dance Theatre was high energy entertainment and wonderfully danced, but irksome in elevating the sole male dancer above the 11 women on stage. That seemed no evolution.
