Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
A college teacher’s job is to help young people into reasonably successful adulthood, or at least increase the odds for that. That’s the goal the UW-Milwaukee Dance Department’s annual winter and spring concerts have always served: Students work with professional choreographers to create meaningful artworks in a professional manner.
The department’s current chair, Simone Ferro, served as artistic director for this year’s “Winterdances: Transformation” concert last weekend and was one of its five choreographers. She welcomed the audience at the university’s Mainstage Theatre on opening night by reminding us that last year’s concert, coincidentally titled “Winterdances: Refuge,” had coincided with a polar vortex deep freeze so dangerous it forced UWM to shut down on the day of dress rehearsal. Somehow, the show opened the next night; that’s meaningful, too. Then, this year’s concert coincided with the apparent climax of the U.S. Senate trial of our impeached president.
So this was a very serious concert: activist, experimental, panic-sharing, hopeful. In program notes, Ferro writes: “If we look closely at what we do and at our contributions to what is happening in our communities, our country and planet in terms of social and environmental justice, we hope that it might trigger a much deeper awareness of our individual responsibilities and the legacy we wish to leave this planet.”
Act One was blessed with live music. Ferro’s Rippled Tides was a call for widespread commitment to environmental justice, with costumes of 100% recycling plastic by Leslie Vaglica and choreography that emphasized the relationship between individual and community in the difficult process of personal transformation. As accompaniment, eight fine musicians from UWM’s Music Department played alumnus Joseph Koykkar’s thrilling “Expressed in Units,” conducted by Ross Venneberg. Then, Dani Kuepper’s Apart at the Seams—an “unraveling” of Gretchen am Spinnrade composed by Franz Schubert at age 18, in which the object of Faust’s desire in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play unravels mentally, was given a gorgeous, harrowing performance by soprano Alaina Carlson and pianist Stephen Swedish—first as written and then as experimental theater with the dancers as her projections: trapped, alone and panicking.
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Act Two began with alumna Emma Draves’ Steel Moon, somberly recalling ancient, communal, religious dramas in which divinities controlled Nature. Current MFA student Maggie Dueker’s What Was/What Is valorized undying friendship in the face of change. Activist-choreographer Bernard Brown’s inspiring Things we carry… reminded us of our responsibility to past and future generations.
