“It’s a very intense week,” Maria Soledad Gillespie told Milwaukee Magazine in a phone call on Tuesday. “I tell myself every time I get into a production that, yes, it’s a lot, it’s on top of everything else you’re already doing. But this is actually what I’m here to do. To make the art.”
Gillespie is among the dance faculty at UW-Milwaukee and has called Milwaukee home for almost 15 years. During that time, she’s produced her own dance performances here and across the country and world, most recently in Seoul, South Korea. There, she and two long-distance collaborators, Nguyên Nguyên and Kevin Williamson, performed their ongoing work called Wild Tongue in 2025.
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This week, Gillespie and four others with ties to UWM will perform in the black box theater at Mitchell Hall for two nights. The program, called Ghost Tongue, Mother Tongue, includes an excerpt from Wild Tongue (performed by Zoe Mei Glise and Maggie Seer) plus four solos, which Gillespie characterizes as “sprouts” or “distant cousins,” sharing DNA with that years-long project.
The common thread in each is lineage and language. In Oratoria, Gillespie performs an autoethnography, further unpacking her Chicana heritage that she’s been exploring in Wild Tongue. This time, though, she is choreographing and dancing alone – as part of a personal challenge.
“I don’t feel like I’ve lost my voice as a singular choreographer, but I have been focused the last 10 years on very rich collaborative processes with Nguyên and Kevin,” she said. “Though I love that, I was actually at this point where I was like, wait, do I still make work by myself? How do I want to work nowadays?”
Gillespie took nine months to try to answer that question, making additional solos for Meg Gourley, Alex Hlavaty and Glise, which are thematically grouped as a joint exploration of literal and figurative lines.
“A story, a narrative has a line – a path, if you will,” she said. “Maps have lines. Ancestries and family trees have lines. Even calligraphy and text have lines. Music and melodies have lines.”
Even in the intense moments, Gillespie said being in the studio has been a refuge, especially working with one dancer at a time.
Spoiler: She still knows how to choreograph.
“These nine months have been like a burning off process,” she said. “Burning off mistrust. Burning off the tendency to put off something because it’s frightening or hard. What’s changed is I feel like I can trust myself. It’s really been exciting.”
Maria Soledad Gillespie’s Ghost Tongue, Mother Tongue is at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 6 and Saturday, Nov. 7 at UWM’s Mitchell Hall, Studio 254 (3203 N. Downer Ave.). Tickets are $28-$40 and available at tickettailor.com.
