Photo by Paul Mitchell
With fingers crossed against storms during the 2013 run of Wild Space Dance Company’s epic outdoor Acts of Wilderness in the Menomonee Valley, choreographer Debra Loewen noticed a row of large greenhouses under construction behind the Domes in nearby Mitchell Park. This year, she investigated. She learned that six of the now completed buildings hold Milwaukee County plantings. The seventh, a soaring glass cathedral with a stone floor and thin silvery support beams, stands empty—a stormproof, temperature-controlled, all-glass theater with a lobby and restrooms.
She got permission to make her newest site-specific dance performance in this newest Milwaukee Country Horticultural Conservatory space. Luminous will unfold in and around that seventh greenhouse on Oct. 22-24. “And I’d love a thunderstorm,” she says. “I’ve never said that about a site-specific piece.”
“We’re very proud of this facility,” says Sandy Foloran, director of the Mitchell Park Domes. “It took three years to build. The six commercial greenhouses have no public access right now, although we’ll probably give tours later on. They serve as working greenhouses for about 80% of the plants for shows here at the Domes and 20% for plantings at Boerner Botanical Gardens and other Milwaukee County Parks. We call the seventh one the Annex. Like the other greenhouses, it was built with radiant floor heat and side ventilation—all the windows open—but it has its own entrance and things like bathrooms that allow us to have public events. We have a winter farmers market from November to June with 40 vendors. It draws, I’m not exaggerating, thousands of people here on Saturdays. But we’ve never had a nighttime public event. This will be a first for us—a trial run.”
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Loewen tells her, “We were here the other night when the full moon was rising. It was just so beautiful. You should do full moon events.”
As the title suggests, lighting will become a major element in Luminous. “It’s really dark in here at night,” Loewen says. “When I look at photographs from our past site-specific shows, one thing that’s predominant is how critical lighting is in the vastness of a big space or outdoors. It reveals the dance and it reveals the space and it can add mystery. I can’t flood this big room with light—for one thing, the glass walls and ceiling reflect it. So there are going to be lots of shadows. The piece has a pretty big cast including some recent UW-Milwaukee graduates and interns along with the Wild Space company members. I like the idea that some dancers appear in shadows.”
Light will also rise outside the glass walls on nature and on dancers. Early in the show, the audience will line up along one glass wall to view performers outside, their shadows splashed against the hard white walls of an adjacent greenhouse. For most of the show, the audience will sit indoors, proscenium-style, while dancers appear in many formations both inside and out. Upon leaving the Annex at the end of the performance, the audience will witness a final outdoor performance, if they look back.
The music will be crucial. The saxophone duo, Duo d’Entre-Deux, is creating a new score for Luminous. They’ll perform it live. These two musicians, Nick Zoulek and Tommy Davis, created the live, interactive accompaniment for Wild Space’s Carried Away in New York last spring. Milwaukee audiences enjoyed a taped version of their brilliant score when the company reprised part of that performance here last May. Now, as they did in New York, the musicians will move through the space like the dancers as they play with and against the room’s acoustics. They’ll play sax duets with sounds produced by elements of the building; for example, they’ll take violin bows to those silvery pillars.
The choreography will also embrace the architecture, Loewen says. “We’ll go from something that’s built to something that moves to something that’s organic.” As always in the site-specific works that have been such a gift to audiences, she’s spent a lot of time in the environment intuiting its secrets, responding to the complicated feeling of the place and sensing what would be appropriate to put there. “You dig deeper and deeper and you keep coming back to just being present with the space,” she says. “And drawing people’s attention to their own presence in the space and how the space changes with the performance.” She’ll have dancers framing other dancers as a subtle echo of the frame that is this great glasswork. “And the dance material itself will transform during the piece—this is very metaphorical—like a bud and blossom. No one will necessarily even notice that, but I’m playing with that idea in a lot of different ways.” Because, after all, it’s a greenhouse.
Performances are offered at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 22-24 at Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory Annex, 524. S. Layton Blvd. A $25 premium ticket includes a 6:45 p.m. pre-show talk on the history of Mitchell Park by Friends of the Domes member Michael Johnston. Advance ticket sales only. Visit wildspacedance.org or call 414-271-0307.
