A multimedia dance work, newly set at One-Off Exhibitions, feels at once cozy and foreboding. That seems to very much be the point of Something Familiar, choreographer Dawn Springer’s latest project inspired by her ancestral roots in Ozark County, Missouri.
Springer’s homeland is a particular place – predominantly rural, conservative, white, evangelical and poor – and provides a compelling juxtaposition to Something Familiar’s placement in an art gallery on Historic Mitchell Street. Three of One-Off Exhibitions’ four walls are the typically blank, white slate, while the fourth, lined with eight chairs for a tiny audience, is countrified: A chair rail divides the wall into two, with the bottom half painted tawny brown and the top stenciled with dainty pink blooms.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
The room, maybe 200 square feet in all, is otherwise sparsely appointed. In the middle sits a white-washed table and three dining chairs. A pair of projectors – one modern, one an old-school 3M classroom-style slide projector – stand on a white podium off to one side.
One-Off curator Tina Schinabeck has worked at some of the region’s largest and most lauded art institutions. Less than a year old, her latest endeavor is a kind of one-roomed sidecar nestled within the gallery Real Tinsel. And though Schinabeck is certainly not the first gallerist in Milwaukee to host dancers, Something Familiar is, in fact, something different. It’s not dance placed in an art gallery. The dance, rather, is the art in the gallery. In addition to Something Familiar’s six live showings (including two more on Feb. 14 and 15), a companion dance film by Rachel Malehorn runs Fridays 11 a.m.-4 p.m. (or by appointment) through Feb. 21.
Something Familiar’s allegorical center is “Walkin’ Down the Line,” a Bob Dylan song covered three or four times throughout the evening, intertwined between a mixtape of swiftly shifting tracks sampling The Dillards, Johann Sebastian Bach, “The Andy Griffith Show,” Jessica Lea Mayfield and a few originals from Milwaukee banjoist Michael Rossetto.
Dylan’s lyrics refer to a “heavy-headed gal.”
“She ain’t feelin’ well,” the song says. “When she’s better only time will tell.”
And dancers Sejain Bastidas, Natalie Dellutri and Janel Meindersee do, apparently, carry a weight. They begin seated at that white-washed table, lit by a simple chandelier and green-shaded sconces on the stenciled wall behind us. They look at one another. Wipe their thighs. Place palms down on the table – and proceed to slap it. Louder, louder, louder.
It feels worth mentioning how much dancing is crammed into this petite performance, running just under 40 minutes in all. Springer doesn’t shy away from technique, in willful defiance of the room’s strict dimensions, dipping dancers in and out through the gallery’s doorway when a few more square inches are needed. The mood waxes and wanes between stoic piety and a barn dance. Discerning skepticism amongst the group is quickly followed by clutched elbows, and back and forth again. These are heavy-headed gals, indeed.
A fourth cast member, Sophia Marie Roth, enters periodically, functioning as a kind of supernumerary for Something Familiar. She turns on the overhead projector, which illuminates a Polaroid-shaped line drawing of hills and trees. The Ozarks, presumably.
Unlike the rest, who wear patterned shift dresses, Roth is dressed for a night at an art gallery. When she comes in again, she wipes part of the drawing away. More the next time, and the next, until it’s gone. Then, she sings – “Walkin’ Down the Line,” of course. Dellutri, backed against one wall, adds her voice in resonant harmony. This happens before Bastidas, hair freed from the braid she wears most of the evening, clutches clumps of calla lilies by their roots and flings them about, then rests them gently at the audience’s feet, which – recall – are mere feet away.
Or did that come after the singing? I can’t fully remember. See, memory feels like a huge piece of this beguiling puzzle, which unfolds like unlocking little trinkets in a curio cabinet, or stories passed down through generations, remembered and misremembered, as folklore tends to be.
Springer’s feels a complicated and sometimes fraught history. Something Familiar reminds the lucky few in those eight chairs how home can be a complicated – and beautiful – construct worth visiting.
