Dancing against ignorance

"Ko-Thi is still treated as a third-class citizen in the state of Wisconsin in terms of funding," the Milwaukee dance company's founding artistic director, Ferne Caulker, tells features editor Cathryn Harding in a preview of the 22-year-old ensemble's Madison Civic Center performance. Caulker, a Sierra Leone native, sees Ko-Thi as a vehicle for getting to the roots of African dance idioms, educating audiences from Milwaukee and Madison to New York and Japan. "Our whole concept is that we're just like you on the block, Jack," Caulker says. "It's just that we have ancestors who came from Africa, and this is what they did." Ko-Thi is still doing it 20 years later, with Caulker at the helm. Harding, until recently the editor at the Charlottesville, Va., weekly C-VILLE, was last week named the new development director for the Columbia Journalism Review.