Moving Between Tongues: Choreographing Translation Project
Friday May 8, 2026
The Body Speaks: Scribing and Scoring Autoethnography
Free Performance, no tickets needed
UW-Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts
Mitchell Hall, Studio 254
Department of Dance Student Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF) Kasey Eckhardt, Paloma Kong-Ndoumbe, Elise Leonard, and Brooke Allison Parkinson collaborate with faculty mentor Maria Gillespie to present an informal showing of their choreographic research. Music performance by Paul Westfahl. They will share their dance in which autoethnography, movement, and language reveal how embodiment is an unfixed, evolving terrain offering a kinesthetic map that coexists with language. As a queer performance practice, the work plays with the constraints of language as a limb to create portals into each other’s dancing stories, and relate to each other as their dancing archives undergo translation and transfiguration.
Elise Rose Leonard
Elise is a Minnesota born artist whose curiosity drives her to create, move, write, make, shape, and more. She is especially interested in telling stories through the body, creating safe spaces for community, and incorporating different forms of language into performance and practice. She will graduate this spring with a BFA in Dance and BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
