Maria Gillespie (Professor, Dance; Director, Dance Graduate Program) was recently awarded the 2024-25 UWM Advancing Research Creativity (ARC) Grant to help fund her yearlong choreographic research project.
Under the working title “Wild Tongue: Translating Embodied Memory in the Language of Dance,” Gillespie will work with long-time collaborators Kevin Williamson and Nguyên Nguyên to explore a variety of identities through dance. Part of this exploration will root in Gillespie’s Chicana ethnicity and queer performance methodologies.
“In ‘Wild Tongue,’ we’re looking at how our different stories, identities, histories, and languages are traced in scripts and then translated through our dancing,” said Gillespie.
Gillespie’s relationship with Williamson and Nguyên began in 2003 in Los Angeles and has resulted in two decades of friendship and collaboration.
“The three of us have this really beautiful reciprocity and spirit of shared authorship and trust,” she said. “We rely on each other to amplify those different threads of our practices.”
With Gillespie now located in Milwaukee, some of the funding from this grant will allow her to travel to Los Angeles and for Williamson and Nguyên to come to Milwaukee, ensuring that they have time to work in person.
Not only do the choreographers benefit from this, but PSOA dance students get the opportunity to work with Williamson and Nguyên when they visit. They offer students a unique pedagogical approach thanks to their backgrounds and identities.
The grant also provides funding for larger-scale production than some of the trio’s past works.
“This grant gives me the opportunity to take the performances that we’ve done over the past two years and really expand it into a new work,” said Gillespie. “But on a scale that’s larger than the production I would have been able to do on my own.”
Gillespie hopes to bring “Wild Tongue” to the Midwest, Los Angeles, and beyond, thanks to funding from the grant.
This project explores the translation of movement, language, and memory and Gillespie’s view of “how dancing bodies are rebellious archives.”
“Every gesture that we make as humans impacts our entire physicality,” said Gillespie. “The dance training that I undergo, that I participate in, shapes how I move and how I express myself.”