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Wild Space’s full-blooded Memories.
Love is a Battlefield
The Chamber Theater's Sweet Folly
FOTO: 13 (or more!) Ways of Looking at the Modern
Milwaukee Ballet's Stomping Gypsies

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Looking Ahead:

Sure, you could buy your mom an overpriced mimosa and a waffle, and send her home with a bouquet of roses, but if you really want to celebrate her and the varied sisterhood of maternity, you couldn’t do better than this weekend’s concert by Your Mother Dances, Elizabeth Johnson’s scrappy little dance troupe. “Friends, Lovers & Mothers” offers new dances by Johnson, Sara Hook, Erika Randall and Anna Sapozhnikov, and true to Johnson’s style, you can bet there will be plenty of humor and a bit of provocation in the choreographic mix. If you simply must have your mimosa, the Sunday performance includes a brunch at the Red Dot restaurant.

If you like your motherhood a bit more traditional, perhaps with a spoonful of sugar and a bouquet of Edelweiss, the Skylight Opera hosts a chance to sing along with the übermater herself, Julie Andrews. Of course Fraulein Maria or Mary Poppins never had children herself – that’s why they were so damn cheery all the time. The Skylight hosts a Sound of Music sing-a-long this weekend. So yes, it’s your chance to sensitively croon “Edelweiss,” punch out the oom-pah countermelody in “Doe, a Deer,” and even shatter the stained glass windows with the final note of “Climb Every Mountain.”

And if you’re looking for the next Richard Rodgers or Oscar Hammerstein, stop by the Tenth Street Theater for the latest venture by Alamo Basement and Insurgent Theater. The brazen lads and lasses are taking “do-it-yourself” theater to another level, creating a full-length musical in the span of 24-hours. I could tell you what “Play in a Day 3: The 24-Hour Musical” is about, but even the playwright and composers don’t know yet. More shows like this could make the lives of arts journalists so much easier!

In the days of Harlem’s jazz house parties, musicians would hold “cutting sessions,” going head-to-head in contests of improvisatory skill. Improvisation aside there’s something like that brewing on the Uihlein Hall stage this week. Two days after Yo-Yo Ma’s special performance with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, principal cellist Joseph Johnson will step downstage and strut his stuff. And for stuff-strutting, the Saint-Saens Cello Concerto No. 1 isn’t a bad choice. A single movement that keeps the cello in the foreground throughout, it’s a great showpiece for a confident and sensitive player like Johnson. Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 3 and Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony round out the program. Andreas Delfs conducts.

Looking Back:

Once on This Island
Two duets occupy the center of Wild Space Dance Company’s Map of Memories. In “Undertow,” Dan Schuchart and Adam Wile find the poetic, dancerly equivalent of backbreaking labor. Trapped in the accelerating repetition of their movement, they don’t stop until exhaustion sets in, and one is literally carried off stage by the other. Just before, in “Missing,” Jade Jablonski and Katie Sopoci dance a duet of powerful and tender grief. Cutting through the stillness of a comforting embrace, the twitching of a foot suggests a muscular sadness, one that has saturated both body and heart. As the duet closes, one dancer lunges toward the memory of a lost husband, and is stopped by the other, both hands cradling her head as she tries to push forward. It’s a longing of the deepest kind, and almost unbearable to watch.

While these dances seem to be the emotional center of Map of Memories, they are only two of the many textures in this remarkable work. Inspired by the lives and stories of the early fishing community that occupied Jones Island in the late 19^th century, Loewen and her dancers have captured the spirit beneath the photographs and stories that serve as their raw material. There is no syrupy nostalgia here. While not necessarily nasty, brutish and short, the lives of the Kashubians – the Polish ethnic group that occupied the island – were spare and elemental.

Debra Loewen’s choreography (in collaboration with the dancers) captures this simplicity with great humor and beauty. In “Sometimes There Was No Fishing,” four men create a seated, beer-bottle ballet, brew-in-hand and elbows akimbo, they hoist and sway and eye imaginary girls walking by. In “At Home,” the lives of couples are traversed with desperate sexuality, violence, and occasional moments of peace. And “Net Making” is about the cold geometry of labor, rendered with precision by Dan Schuchart and Laura Murphy.

But the bleakness of the world is balanced by the spirit of celebration, beautifully evoked in ensembles that pay tribute to the land, the lake and the community. In another context, the Map of Memories’ exuberant finale would simply be a variation on a traditional folk dance, but here it carries the richness of the life and history that permeates what we’ve just seen. It’s a full-blooded journey back into a rich past.