Portfolio
Global Water Dance
Global Water Dance at Parklawn Community Resource Fair – a partnership project of DanceCircus and Northwest Side Community Development Commission. Global Water Dance brought together all ages to engage in local water issues—Lincoln Creek redevelopment—and reflect on international water concerns.
The performance begins with families exploring water moving in the four seasons using a parachute, then NWSCDC staff talked about storm water basins protecting the river as dancers moved the river, the Global Water Dance (scarcity to abundance) and concluding with a hand dance for everyone.
World Ocean Day
Shari Lauter’s call and response music, inspired a call and response version of the GWD dance for World Ocean Day. Repeating the dance three times, each round included more dancers of diverse ages, races and gender identity. Performed and recorded at Harbor View Plaza in the heart of Milwaukee’s working harbor and international port.
Restore the Earth
For EARTH DAY 2021, DanceCircus created a series of dance about fire, water, air, earth to the music of Minimal Dance. Drawing from different performances, company dancers performed in the North Rain Water Basin in the Near West Side of Milwaukee. once an area where homes were frequently flood by near-by Lincoln Creek, it is now a park-like space that serves as an overflow area protecting homes. The dance/video was created in partnership with Near West Side Community Development Commission as part of three outdoor community performance events in the spring of 2021.
Site/Sight - Dominoes
Summer 2020, DanceCircus brought together poets and youth, dancers and choreographer in the Site/Sight Project collaborative project. Funds from Wisconsin Arts Board Creative Communities-Local Arts placed spoken-word poets Unique Ross and Ashley Ammorelle Smith at Neighborhood House to facilitate workshops with 10 youth. These young poets wrote powerful, nuanced, emotion-filled words about their summer of 2020.
Fall 2020 saw the live flash dance performance of Site/Sight – canceled. We made a pivot to create a dance/spoken-word/video. Ten company and community dancers took to the streets and alleys, parks and parking lots of Avenues West to dance for the camera.
MONARCHS - A Migration Tale
An original DanceCircus production, Monarchs, Mounds, Migrations transforms the epic migrations of monarchs, milkweed and migrants into a dance-theatre of departures, arrivals and dance journeys metamorphosing spirit into hope.
Director Betty Salamun and Karlies Kelly, Michaele Chaigneau-Norton, Ana Paula Soares Lynch, Kavon Cortez-Jones, Jahmes Finlayson, Mark Mantel, Mark Wooldrage, and PanDanza Dance Company weave dance, poetry and stories of ice ages, pre-conquest North American culture and America’s promise into a hero’s journey of human dimensions.