It’s called Wild Tongue, but dancer/choreographer Maria Gillespie’s latest project is about what goes unspoken as much as it’s about what gets said.
This subtly sardonic, immersive piece is an interrogation of identity and belonging, mixing written and spoken word with improvised dancing. It has been brewing for years, stemming from Gillespie’s decades-long collaboration and friendship with Los Angeles-based artists Nguyên Nguyên and Kevin Williamson.
“I moved from Los Angeles to Milwaukee in 2012,” says Gillespie, a dance professor in the Peck School of the Arts at UW-Milwaukee. “There was culture shock, and there was climate shock for me. But I think more than anything it was leaving the chosen family of these two friends.”
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The first of the trio’s co-authored pieces, to get there from here, was presented in California in 2022. Last April, Milwaukee got the first taste of Wild Tongue’s improvised score blending themes of culture, identity, migration and home. Gillespie started the project with writings by Gloria Anzaldúa, a queer Chicana writer and feminist theorist who wrote about her experience growing up on the Mexico-Texas border.
“My own exploration of my Chicana identity and its erasure led me into her work,” says Gillespie. “There’s a chapter called Wild Tongue where she’s writing about being punished as a child for speaking Spanish in Texas. Nguyên is looking at his Vietnamese refugee and queer identity. And Kevin is looking at queer pleasure and pain. We’re an unruly composite of different experiences and perspectives. They overlap in grotesque and beautiful ways.”
Gillespie sees Wild Tongue continuing to develop for another few years; the trio is creating a touring teaching practice that brings marginalized groups together to unlock their own interlocking identities. Last year, Gillespie received $18,000 from UWM’s Advancing Research and Creativity Grant, making it easier for the trio to work between LA and Milwaukee.
The culture shock that’s an undercurrent in Wild Tongue was partly due to the absence of a thriving experimental dance scene outside the university’s walls, Gillespie says. Her ongoing arts incubator, Hyperlocal MKE, seeks to change that by connecting dancers and music improvisers in spaces throughout the city. But enticing UWM graduates to stay in Milwaukee remains a challenge, in large part because there are few spaces outside the university with an adequate dance floor.
“If I won the lotto, I would not build a company. I would not build a school. I would build a space for dance,” Gillespie says.
The space gap, she says, has left dance underrepresented in Milwaukee’s vibrant arts scene. Perhaps paradoxically, when artists visit, they’re inspired and rejuvenated.
“There’s so much potential here – so many amazing dancers. But there’s no table for them to sit down and eat at. We just need a table.”
