Three expatriate dancers (and one comedian) home for the holidays

Sarah Wilbur Price, founding artistic director of Danceworks Performance Company and a major force on the Milwaukee dance scene, moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2008. L.A. was a better place for her husband, Eric Price, a comedian and actor.

Along with dozens of other friends and admirers, I caught up with Sarah and Eric at a party at Cafe Centraal on Dec. 21. Here’s the latest:

 

Sarah, after a not so fulfilling stint in grad school at Cal State-Long Beach, is now at UCLA on a prestigious Javits Fellowship. The dance program there leans much more toward ethnology and academic study and not so much toward studio work. She’s fine with that, in part because it fits in neatly with the Wide Sky concept of community involvement in dance, which she spent years developing at Danceworks. A West Coast version of Wide Sky is part of her thesis work at UCLA.

She’s fired up about the academic stuff and is considering extending her fellowship into a doctorate. She put it this way in a Facebook message: “Tthe full funding from Javits certainly makes it tempting! The REAL question is whether anyone but me cares about the development of a relational-aesthetic theory of choreographic communitization.”

Eric update, in Sarah’s (edited) words, via Facebook: Eric was a regular on MadTV in its last season. When that wrapped in 09, Eric has busied himself on a range of projects, including shooting some goofiness for comedy web-engines (including funnyordie.com, improv with Upright Citizens Brigade, and a sketch pilot for  network produced by/featuring Chelsea Handler (Chelsea Lately). He voiced two characters in the upcoming Lionsgate animated release ALPHA & OMEGA, which should be out later this year. He plays opposite Larry Miller (Best In Show, Waiting For Guffman). Eric plays a lazy wolf named Mooch and a sassy duck named Paddy.

Katie Sopoci Drake, an Eden Prairie, Minn., native, came to Milwaukee for graduate school at UWM and stayed for years. She became a go-to dancer for Deb Loewen (Wild Space Co.) and a favorite of Elizabeth Johnson (Your Mother Dances Co.). She moved to Florida late last summer because her husband, Mayville, Wis., native Saul Sopoci Drake got a job at the Seminole nation’s  Ah Tah Thi Ki Museum in Hollywood, Fla., between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. (Footnote: Katie Sopoci added Saul Drake’s name to hers, and Saul Drake added hers to his.)

I caught up with Katie Dec. 30, for coffee on Brady Street, after she had taken a ballet class full of old friends at the nearby Danceworks studio.

On stage, Sopoci Drake is an exotic presence, with her long-lined, feline way of moving (tinged with Brazlian capoeira), her wondrously high cheekbones and mysterious eyes. Offstage, she’s good-humored, bubbly, quick to laugh, frank.

Sopoci Drake, who recently turned 30, has already latched on with the Momentum Dance Company in Miami. The artistic director is Delma Ilse. She doesn’t do things the way they get done in Milwaukee. Choreographers here rather expect the dancers to contribute their ideas to a creative process, a way of working that comes from the ethos of the intensely creative UWM dance department.

“It’s a very different experience for me,” she said. “Up here, everything is very modern. Down there, every modern dance company is based in ballet, and it’s all Horton or Limon and THE END. They don’t have the kind of creative process you have here. It’s not what I’m used to, but I will get to dance Sokolow, Limon and so on.”

She is also teaching at Miami Dade Community College, where they seemed to regard her as a rare bird.

“I teach Bartinieff Fundamentals,” she said. “People say, ‘This is amazing! Did you make it up?’ Nooo0….

“It’s kinda fun being the bringer of new ideas.”

South Florida culture shock goes beyond dance.

“Saul works in the middle of the Everglades, and a canal runs behind our apartment,” she said. “You can see alligators floating along. And the iguanas! They’re big and they’re fast. Our dog is like: ‘Whoa! You didn’t tell me about these things!”

As she explained, Katie made swung her arms and shoulders into a loping, disjointed, and alarmingly iguana-like sort of gait. At least Florida is expanding her movement vocabulary.

 

Catey Ott, a Milwaukee native, took off to New York after completing her bachelor’s degree at UWM. She danced there for nine year, came home for grad school, danced in Milwaukee for a few years more, then it was back to NYC.

I don’t have to tell you how Catey’s doing. You can see for yourself this weekend (Jan. 8-10), when her Catey Ott Dance Collective performs at Danceworks.

The work on this concert grows Ott’s meditative practice of yoga. It is all about “involvement in the present moment … a sense of living your meditation.” Barbi Powers and Jes Louise Schultz will be here from NYC, and six Milwaukee dancers will join them in Hope. Ott and friends will dance to music by Randall Woolf, Bora Yoon, Vijay Iyer, Iva Bittova and Marti Epstein.

Tickets $15-$25. Showtime 7:30 p.m., final matinee 2:30 p.m. Visit Danceworks or call 414-277-8480 ext. 6025.