Winterdances: Resilience is faculty concert featuring the original choreography by dance department faculty members Ishmael Konney, Dawn Springer, and Mair Culbreth, as well as guest artist David Roussève. Winterdances: Resilience presents dance works that uplift the human connection through storytelling, joy, and resilience. Here’s a preview of the world premiere works.
Be My Ground, When The World Lets Go
Dr. Mair Culbreth
This work began with a kinesthetic investigation of vertigo—as both a bodily sensation and a condition of ambivalence. Drawing inspiration from filmmaker Catherine Yass’s Falling Away, the process explored verticality not only as a physical experience but as the unsettling sensation of slipping away from oneself, from certainty, from what is known. Vertigo, commonly understood as dizziness or disorientation, emerges here as a rift between subject and reality—an embodied manifestation of the human desire for balance amid instability.
The sensation of high places and the existential anxiety provoked by the possibility of falling became a metaphor for moments of personal and socio-cultural upheaval. Through movement research with ropes, the dancers investigate how bodies navigate risk, dependence, and trust—how we create ground for one another when stability is no longer guaranteed. Suspended between falling and holding, the work imagines new modes of orientation and relationality in times of collective uncertainty.
Engaging surrealist materials such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, the piece approaches surrealism not as escape, but as adaptation: a reorientation toward the strange, fractured, and off-kilter realities of the present moment.
Ghana Must Go
Ishmael Konney
Inspired by the 1983 expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria, Ghana Must Go uses this historical event as a lens to examine the broader human story of movement: forced and unforced migration, relocation, and the search for belonging. Through the metaphor of the body as a bag, the piece explores what we carry with us: memory, identity, and the invisible weight of home.
It also reflects on the human connections that emerge through migration, the encounters, relationships, and shared experiences that form as people move from place to place. In Ghana Must Go, movement becomes both burden and bridge, revealing how displacement can also create new forms of community and resilience.
Harps That Once
Dawn Springer
The creative process for this piece explored the maturation process of discovering that the structures we exist in (perhaps familial or societal) are often not fixed but constantly shifting. During the choreographic research, I looked for symbols from other times and places that encapsulated those ideas. That included stories from the paternal side of my family history, Irish poetry, Catholic imagery and culture, and 80s-90s pop music.
The title references Irish poet Thomas Moore’s 17th century poem, The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls, written while Ireland was under English rule. Considering similar themes of cultural inheritence and loss, Harps That Once reflects on what resonates after structures and ideals fracture — what remains and what is built when the illusion of permanence fades.
CARE
David Roussève
Roussève partnered with UWM Dance and community partners Diverse & Resilient and local dancers to create his work “CARE,” which serves as the final stage of Roussève’s dance and community-engaged research project, Care: Illuminating Milwaukee’s Queer and Trans Communities. Roussève’s piece features three local ballroom dancers who collaborated with him on the crucial vogue and ballroom section of the work. Richard Buda Brasfield, Jacques Infiniti Hall, and DaCosta Martín worked closely with Roussève to bring the authenticity and artistry of vogue to Roussève’s contemporary work.
Winterdances: Resilience runs from February 5 – 8 at UWM’s Mainstage Theatre. Visit the PSOA Events calendar for more information and to purchase tickets.
Story by Payton Murphy ’27 (BFA Film)