Photo Credit: Paul Mitchell
My family had a milkman when I was a child in the ’50s. He’d set bottles of milk inside our unlocked back door early each morning. Wild Space Dance Company’s latest site-specific dance theater performance was conceived in an East Side dairy distributor’s plant from that long-ago era.
The performance opened with a seated young woman pouring glasses of milk from old-style bottles, and drinking it while absorbing old time radio infomercials extolling the importance of pasteurized milk to our diets. We, in the audience, stood at one end of the building’s garage space where milk trucks must once have been loaded. The seated woman, appealingly androgynous, intensely focused on her tasks, interrupted the pouring and drinking with rapid mysterious hand and finger moves that would be echoed by others throughout the performance.
A sudden light change directed our attention to an open area on our left. It featured a narrow passageway, five feet high at most, leading to another area invisible but for what could be glimpsed through that opening. Women were moving there. One came and went through the passageway. Now other women appeared in shadows further left, and we saw hints of a large room beyond the peeling concrete pillars. Another light shift told us to move to the opposite end of that initial garage area to discover what a deep red light might be signaling.
That red light came from an area below ground level—who knows what it might have held? It made a rich backdrop for a trio of women dancing alone and together, always with engaging internal focus, mutual connectedness and mystery. We sat on narrow benches in haunted house lighting, took in the yellowing tiled walls, peeling paint, ceiling fan and what sounded at first like a distant alarm but was, in fact, composer/sound designer C. Olivia Valenza approaching from the darkness playing clarinet.
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So it went, discovery after discovery, passing through four further areas of the building’s ground floor, enthralled by changing lighting, textures, and live music while eight women interacted with walls, pillars, floors and metal milk crates. We were taken to every area twice, but our gazes were directed so differently on the second visit that it seemed a new site. Finally, we were freed to explore as we pleased. The dancers we’d met were now scattered like spirits. And I haven’t even mentioned the toy cows and tiny milkman.
