Water Street Dance MKE Shines a Gorgeous Light in ‘Illuminate’

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Photo: Water Street Dance MKE - waterstreetdancemke.com

Water Street Dance Milwaukee 'Illuminate'

Water Street Dance Milwaukee 'Illuminate'

Water Street Dance MKE returned to Milwaukee from its new home in Cedarburg last weekend with a program of six dances, three of them world premieres. The show in the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre was titled “llluminate.” It shined gorgeous light on the company as it exists today. I’d guess from the assured and powerful performances that the creative process was also aimed at self-illumination: the artists at a new stage in their journey.

It’s been three years since artistic director Morgan Williams founded the company, along with some dancers from his former group. Their last performance in town was a year ago, outdoors on the island in Lake Michigan just off the Summerfest grounds, where they danced in their unique contemporary style to baroque era music among a sculpted flock of “regenerated plastic” swallows on the grass. The company now has seven professional dancers (eight when Williams steps in) and seven “trainees.”

I found every moment of the opening night performance compelling. The style is abstract—a distinctive mix of balletic and urban, acrobatic and pedestrian, percussive and melodic, with sudden contrasts of speed and direction. There’s also plenty of wit, and brilliant lighting by Cole Castine.

Free Interaction

 It’s group work, mostly. Like members of an orchestra, the dancers are keenly aware of one another. Sensitive but also free in their interactions, they focus on each other, not the audience. The many physical feats maintain spiritual energy. There’s no showing off, no matter how impossible the steps.

The show’s choreographers were Williams, associate artistic director and dancer Ashley Tomaszewski, dancer Alex Seager, resident choreographer Arinze Okammor, and nationally recognized freelancer Madison Hicks. All worked in collaboration with the dancers, the majority of whom are white women. Williams and Okammor identify as Black men. All the choreography has an interracial and nonbinary character. As my woman friend said about the cast, these women can do anything.

The powerful musical accompaniment was by an array of contemporary artists I’ve never heard of, with two exceptions. One exception was the suite of songs by Bon Iver on which Williams choreographed a series of dances early on and has kept in the company’s repertory. It includes a passage in which the dancers enter the audience and bring willing folks of all ages onto the stage with them. Suddenly, there’s no distinction between dancers and audience. We see a group of human beings, equally vulnerable and valuable.

The other exception was a contemporary electronic rendition of the famously soul-stirring Sugar Plum Fairy Pas de Deux that tends to mark the choreographic high point of any staging of The Nutcracker. Tomaszewsky’s choreography, as danced by the trainees Jo Brockway, Greta Linder, Brynne Monteagudo, and Jade Ortiz, matched Tchaikovsky’s glories with extreme movements ferociously executed, and with clear expressions of fear, sorrow, or anger on the dancers’ faces. It was as if these young women understood that it was now their turn to confront dance history and all that it speaks of in the history of the West. I laughed and cried. I wanted it to never end.