Upcoming — Maria Gillespie

Upcoming Performances

Purchase Tickets

November 6 & 7, 2026, 7:30pm

Choreography by Maria Soledad Gillespie

Mitchell Studio #254
UW-Milwaukee
3203 N Downer Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53211

Featured performers: Zoe Mei Glise, Meg Gourley, Alex Hlavaty, Maggie Seer, and Paul Westfahl

Tickets: Students $15, General Admission $28, Supporter $40

Ghost Tongue, Mother Tongue is an evening of new, experimental dance works by choreographer and director Maria Soledad Gillespie. Gillespie has made her artistic home here in Milwaukee for the past 15 years, where she is a professor of dance at UWM, after re-locating from Los Angeles, CA. Gillespie will share an evening of new works born from four years of research exploring translation, language, and the archives of embodied story-making. Gillespie’s project revels in the evocative, conceptual, and abstract ways that stories and language spring from our bodies. This collection of solos and duets is formed from her unique choreographic style that blends kineticism, expressivity, text, and gesture to illustrate tenderness as a translation guide to the embodied experience and memory that words cannot convey. Gillespie draws on her decades of choreographic practice that sits playfully between dance theatre and experimental choreographic installation, to share a series of new works.

The title of this concert, Ghost Tongue, Mother Tongue, refers to the origin point of her research that explored memory, fracture, the erasure of her Chicana heritage and the assimilation that was the cause of ethnic and linguistic erasure. Memories, songs, stories, and a fractured but precious linguistic trail of her grandmother’s native tongue, Spanish, have fed recent evening length dance theatre works, to get there from here and Wild Tongue, made with longtime collaborators Nguyen Nguyen and Kevin Williamson.

Gillespie continue this exploration here in Milwaukee and created works based on the themes in language, unruly meaning making, and the vulnerability of embodied memory. After 15 years of intense collaboration, these works allow a platform for Gillespie to explore her voice again as a solo choreographer. Gillespie partnered 4 professional dancers to create these dances: two graduate students from UWM’s Department of Dance MFA students, and UWM Dance alumni. This evening of dance combines a suite of solos, two duets, and an ensemble improvised work by the group, MG/ The Collaboratory. Gillespie will also include in the evening an excerpted duet from Wild Tongue, called Love, Perpendicular.