Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers presents Sea of Memories

This experimental modern dance troupe approaches artmaking collaboratively, from innovative partnerships with visual artists and musicians to dancers providing input. Mulgrew’s style is appealingly whimsical, with frequent use of props. It includes strange images and explores substantial concerns without going to the dark side. Her creative signature is easy to identify, though no two works are alike.

The Living Museum

The opening segment (part preshow, part greatest hits), The Living Museum (2026), consisted of seven performance installations excerpting the company’s signature works. AMM & DCO performed earlier iterations of The Living Museum on its 20th and 20th anniversaries. This version invited the audience to enter the company’s “museum” by removing their shoes, stepping onstage, and moving among the performers.

Shelby Bakota, Joseph Cicala, Jasmin Cicchino, J.A. Kirk, Leslie Ann Pike, India Scott, and Nerissa Tunnessen performed individually in tandem. The stage was full of color and movement as Elrey Belmonti guided viewers through. Music stands displayed written information about the performances, like gallery wall text. The dancers’ focus was impressive, and Mulgrew’s experience with outdoor performances and site work was apparent, establishing the comprehensive cohesion of a museum exhibit.

An ocean of inspiration

A new work, Sea of Memories, concluded the concert to give it a sense of the company’s timeline connecting to the present moment. Inspired by the ocean as a source of life and creation, and memories of times spent there, the work evoked its real and symbolic energy and power. Dancers wore shades of blue, gray, and turquoise, moving as if swimming to electronic music that sounded like it was underwater. They formed a human reef before their bodies resembled kinetic kelp among rolling waves. Tunnessen and Kirk defied gravity with effortless-seeming leaps. The dancers lifted one another in various configurations before beginning to speak, one by one, from their own memories.

Between these bookends, the concert revisited works from AMM & DCO’s four decades. An excerpt from Facing 9-5 (1986) commented on the drudgery of office work, with dancers in slacks and ties making repetitive, robotic movements to mechanical sounds. The original, full-length dance featured large, cartoonish human figures made of plywood, a collaboration with sculptor Susan Sapareto. The figures are lost, but in 1986, dancers moved among them. The visual contrast of live, moving bodies with false, stationary ones then surely emphasized the choice between pursuing a passion or earning a living that artists (and many others) often consider necessary. Today’s gig economy and hustle culture are bleaker than this 9-5, but it captured a performativity, futility, and erratic pace familiar to 21st-century workers.

Enduring originals

Short films highlighted Mulgrew’s partnerships and creative diversity. Paper Waitress (2000) was a charming black-and-white experimental video that Mulgrew and Carmella Vassor-Johnson created to accompany a live performance. There was also an excerpt of Tales of the Buffoon, the 1992 WHYY-TV film arising from the 1990 Painted Bride performance. The brainchild of Philadelphia artist Mitchell Gillette, Tales of the Buffoon draws from Russian folklore. Gillette collaborated with Mulgrew, who performed as the Buffoon’s wife, before special effects allowed her choreography and dancers to enter the two-dimensional world of his cartoons. This technology is widely available now, but it remains rare in dance, making AMM & DCO’s Tales an enduring original.

Three visually compelling pieces—Unknown City (1999), SALT (2009), and Three Women Three Bowls (2018)—rounded out the concert, but this was not all it had to offer. Before the show, a photo and video slide show outside the theater displayed images of Mulgrew and dancers over the years. Veterans of The Umbrella Dance, a site-specific work AMM & DCO has performed outdoors throughout Philly, caught up with each other as the projections reflected the visual impact of that performance’s various iterations.

AMM&DCO persists

At the end of the show, Mulgrew joined the performers onstage to teach viewers a simple sequence we could do in our seats before inviting us onstage to dance with them. Knowing Mulgrew best as a choreographer, I appreciated how Sea of Memories established her as a collaborator and a performer. Several of AMM & DCO’s onetime partners no longer exist, from dance venues like the Painted Bride and Group Motion Multimedia Dance Theater to institutions like Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers and University of the Arts. Mulgrew and dancers persist, and Sea of Memories celebrates its creative legacy.

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