Photo credit: Altvra
Dani Kuepper
On the positive end, I think dance in Milwaukee is becoming very collaborative. For Danceworks, that’s a stronghold. In our company, Christal Wagner works with Cadance Collective, a music-dance collaboration. At UW-Milwaukee, Maria Gillespie is constantly working with sculptors and visual artists. Daniel Burkholder, as well, collaborates with musicians or by being site-specific—that interdisciplinary focus of what if you don’t want your dancers to be in a theater? Most choreographers in town are thinking about collaborative, interdisciplinary work, asking how they can connect people and stories and modes of thinking. That goes to the core of Danceworks, I think, because our mission is to enhance the joint creativity of the Milwaukee community, and you broaden your chances by reaching into different disciplines.
“It’s like in grant writing: Do you look for the grants and then make your art to please them? No, never. However, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making dances that people will see. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making dances that new people will see. Not because you want the money, because if I wanted the money, I could probably get some corporate job somewhere. But simply, I’m too old to keep doing shows for my mom, you know? I keep saying this to my husband and to myself: If I’m going to be away from my children and miss their soccer games, it better be for a damn good reason! And it’s not for money. I think it had better be that we have an opportunity to connect with people that wouldn’t see dance otherwise.
“In the fall, we did the Levi Fischer Ames show. To me, that was much more a play, a physical theater piece. That was cool, because we’ve never done anything so clearly in that aesthetic before, and it also definitely connected us with theater-goers. There were people who came to see that show that I had never seen at our black box theater before.
Choreographer and dancer Dani Kuepper joined the Danceworks Performance Company as a dancer in 1998 after completing her Master of Fine Arts with the UW-Milwaukee Dance Department, where she’s been a faculty member since 1999. She became artistic director of DPC in the early 2000s and in 2018 was appointed artistic director of the larger Danceworks, Inc.
