The past weekend has definitely been an art-filled extravaganza for the city of Madison. Between NoName at the Orpheum, the start of the FoodFight Foodie Week and many other events in the area both large and small, there was ample entertainment for all the Madison communities. Among them included the annual dance department faculty concert titled “Neither East Nor West,” held in the Margaret H'doubler Performance Space of Lathrop Hall. Dance department students performed works choreographed by some of the university’s most renowned professors, and the audiences were, without a doubt, impressed.
The professors and choreographers included Kate Corby, with internationally shown works and multi-magazine recognition including Chicago Reader and Dance Magazine, Li Chiao-Ping, who received multiple campus and international awards and personally crafted original solos , Liz Sexe, who received her Master of Fine Arts from Mills College and was featured in the World Dance Alliance Festival, Chris Walker, who has presented his research and lecture performances through Jamaica’s National Dance Theater Company and NuMoRune Collaborative and Jin-Wen Yu, a former member of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre who is now the dance department chair at UW-Madison, having produced more than 100 stage works.
With this lineup of fantastic professors, attending guests were certainly in for a treat. In an accompanying myriad of piercing and shuffling sounds, the students flooded the stage with their noticeably practiced presence. In the first show, “Pierrots in Perpetual Night,” we witnessed students effortlessly toss their bodies into the arms of their peers after bounding across the stage. Watching it felt like the wind itself was repeatedly tossed and carried, while we heard brief excerpts by students from Albert Morris’s “Feelings,” John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” and David Charlton’s “Love Hate.”
Following this show was “Paging Into the Realm of Imagination,” in which three women were revealed on downstage right flipping through unknown sheets of paper. But when dancer Palmer Matthews entered the scene, this simple act was disrupted by a pace change. The women who gently paged sheets of paper suddenly scattered them all to the floor in what could only be perceived as frustration. The new body on stage seemed to spark a discovery of individual relationships in the characters that Isabel Esch, Molly Hodgson and Lyndsay Lewis embodied.
Using paper as an outward representation of the character’s emotions and relationships returned after the intermission in the show “Folding, Unfolding and Refolding.” Lights came on to reveal large sheets of paper checkered across the floor. The dancers on the uncovered spots began to demonstrate their skills in the confined spaces between the sheets before aggressively balling up their adjacent papers. Some dancers began to sit on the sheets, creating a struggle for those attempting to snatch up the sheets that represented their emotions.
The next show was Chris Walker’s “Walk, March, Run.” The performance started with a mysterious solo by student Jessica Robling. She analyzed, then entered a small circle of light – almost like it represented the moon – in which she bounced, jigged and struck long warrior-like poses along its perimeter. Jessica’s moonlight shrank smaller and smaller every time she returned full circle before she was joined by Dancers Jade Ortiz, Nicolette Meunier and Monica Holland, who rose a proud fist while the others created a powerful foundation with their bodies for Jessica to climb atop.
While watching these impressionable moments of the concert, it’s expected to create your own narrative of the ensemble of unorthodox sounds, lights and movements. A brief exposition on the sets from the professors would have added clearer dynamic, yet perhaps what the choreographers desired was an unfiltered understanding. Sometimes, there was so much layered and fish-eyed activity that you may feel overwhelmed with analysis. For instance, the audience must adjust from Kanyon Elton and Amanda Graziano’s duet in “The Other and One” to a mash of running and falling in “Two” and “Still Life.” Both showcase strong performances while invoking the inquiry of a larger narrative. But throughout the event, the talent and hard work of the students were clearly apparent, and the study and experience of the faculty was riveting.
