Photo Credit: Brea Graber
Debra Loewen’s new Wild Space Dance Company performance Making/Unmaking was a kind of perfect representation of the notion of dance as art in motion. In this case, art means visual art, made and unmade every nanosecond in the form of movement, with dancers as both makers and material. The performance space—the large new art exhibition space called The Warehouse, recently opened by Guardian Fine Arts Services at 1635 W. St. Paul Ave.—served as canvas and frame. At moments, the physical actions of painting and sculpting inspired the choreography while the size, shape, tempo and vitality of the movements suggested the style of the resulting artwork. At other moments, the piece had me considering what happens internally as we view visual art, the intellectual connections we make that can lead us to life’s mysteries or civilizations’ histories.
In the dancers’ focused performances, I also glimpsed the hard thought and courage required to put brush to canvas. Likewise, with no story to follow or musical score to embody, the piece called attention to the creative decision-making necessary to engage an audience with the movement of bodies through an otherwise empty room for well over an hour. Loewen was asking what dance is. Her answers were unpretentious reminders of the works of modern art masters she admires, such as Helen Frankenthaler for whom part of this program was named: pure visual-kinesthetic phenomena such as lines, shapes, layers, colors and scale.
The wild live sound accompaniment by C. Olivia Valenza was of equal importance. I don’t know how she produced much of it. I saw her in the corner playing the plates of a toy xylophone with a violin bow; then sometimes moving among the dancers while producing haunting hums with a leaf-blower and a cardboard tube or by breathing through a clarinet. All her sounds were a-rhythmic, so the dancers started and stopped and chose tempos in response to one another.
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As a prologue, the audience wandered the space at will, discovering internally-focused dancers working with sheets of crinkly paper, interacting sculpturally with the room’s large pillars or piecing together a sliced up photo by one of Wisconsin’s leading artists, Tom Bamberger. There was bench seating along three walls. We choose a spot, switched to a different wall at midpoint and to a central circle for the finale. I loved the proximity to these interesting dancers and the changing perspectives.
