Photo credit: Meredith W. Watts
Simone Ferro
Milwaukee is a small big city where dance expands its potential daily. It is enough to be involved with the dance community in Milwaukee to realize that there is some dance-related event taking place in the city virtually every week. Milwaukee has a highly dynamic and vibrant community, and it offers affordable performance spaces that support diversity, experimentation and innovation.
The audience environment in the city is willing to embrace multiple and cross-disciplinary creative projects across a plethora of movement practices and cultural forms. There is a wealth of diverse dance forms and styles in the city that often blend seamlessly into new creative work.
Because of its status as a middle-sized city with a scarcity of funds for the arts, the Milwaukee dance community has developed many cooperative enterprises and embraces collegial support with its creative artists and its audiences. This richness in the Milwaukee dance world gives it a strong foundation to maintain and build its breadth and depth in the city.
Brazilian-born and a professional dancer in South America and Europe before moving to the U.S. for graduate school in Iowa, Simone Ferro joined the UW-Milwaukee Dance Department in 2001 as its Master of Fine Arts program director. This is her second year as department chair and as president of the Wisconsin Dance Council. She writes that she is “a strong advocate for the coexistence of social justice and the arts.” With her students, she’s studying the human history of Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood and bringing that research to bear on their dance work.
