Danceworks, organically grown

When Dani Kuepper started dreaming up the latest Danceworks project, which opens Thursday, the ancient Stone Soup fable was playing in her head:

Hungry strangers stop in a medieval town. The beg for food, but no one’s giving. So they build a fire and fill their camp cauldron with water. They place a large stone in the cauldron and the water to boil. Curiosity gets the better of the townsfolk. The strangers explain that they’re making stone soup. It’s delicious, but could use some garnish. In any case, they’ll be happy to share when it’s done. Word spreads; carrot by carrot, bone by bone, bean by bean, the intrigued, engaged villagers come together to make soup that nourishes all of them.

Cooperation plus food. Hmmm…

“Someone told me about Sweetwater Organics,” Kuepper said. “I heard that they had a big indoor space. I came down to have a look, and got a feeling for the place. There’s a generosity of spirit here — it’s a lot like Danceworks. It felt like a good fit.”

Sweetwater’s owners welcomed the dance company. Tuesday afternoon, when I caught up with Kuepper and dancer-choreographer Kim Johnson-Rockafellow, Danceworks and Sweetwater crews were clearing and sweeping the north shed of the two-building complex. They had to move a heavy conveyor belt, among other things, to clear a 25-by-70 foot performance space for the nine dancers and Seth Warren-Crow’s band.

A tour of the south building, where Sweetwater has put together a tiered system with plants on top and fish tanks on the bottom, is an important part of the evening, from Kuepper’s point of view. The circular system in which enriched water from the fish tanks fertilizes and waters the plants, then drains filters back to the tanks, inspired Kuepper and the dancers.

“We absorbed their concepts,” Kuepper said. “The themes of the dance are circularity and water.”

She charged the dancers to devise phrases relating to those ideas. So the dancers are like the villagers, bringing their own ingredients. Kuepper, with advice from Johnson-Rockafellow, measured and blended the ingredients into a finished whole.

A few more elements are in the mix. Kuepper assigned the group to work out ricochet movement. Then there’s the whole idea of bio-mimicry, of looking at nature to inspire technology, a Sweetwater principle. Kuepper adapted it thus: Dancer A makes a phrase. Dancer B sees it twice, then copies it as best he (or she) can. The copy is certain to be imperfect. So when two dancers begin their phrases together, a natural phasing rhythm ensues. They will go in and out of synch in complex rhythms — all organically grown.

This sounds abstract, and it is. Kuepper and the dancers were never out to create a narrative or didactic piece about the virtues of an organic diet. It doesn’t tell you about organic processes; it is an organic process. The official choreography credit for the piece is: The Company.

“The choreography is by all the dancers,” Johnson-Rockafellow said. “There is a generosity in movement and in the way it’s made.”

Of course the physical nature of the space also shapes the dance. It’s wide and shallow, which lends itself to certain geometries and not to others. It’s industrial and rough (wear sensible shoes), with a sealed concrete floor.

“You can’t jump on this floor,” Kuepper said, “but it’s perfect for turning. This is a very physical dance, but the physicality is all in the turns and the partnering.”

Kuepper credited composer Seth Warren-Crow for his help in structuring the dance. He recorded and incorporated into his score some of the sounds of urban agriculture and aquaculture, and he gave her a musical blueprint before she assembled the parts.

“We have our 4/4 section, our polyrhythmic section, our ricochets, our circular music, our water noises with no rhythm,” Kuepper said.

She agreed that Stone Soup could move to a proscenium stage and that no one would ever guess that it had any connection to Sweetwater Organics. But she believes it grew organically from the place. She thinks of the 15-minute pre-concert tour of Sweetwater as a crucial audience experience, one that will change the way they see the dance.

“The more I see the dancers in this piece,” Kuepper said, “they more they look like an organism to me. It’s not devoid of human emotion — when people touch one another, there’s always emotion. But it’s more about an organism.”

Sweet Water Organics is at 2151 S. Robinson Ave., Bay View. Stone Soup will be served at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, April 28-May 1. Tours of Sweetwater — a very interesting place — begin at 6:45 and 7 p.m. each night. Tickets are $25 and $20, $15 for students. Visit the Danceworks website or call 414 277-8480 ext. 6025.