Photo Credit: Paul Mitchell
On the night of the first televised impeachment hearing, after record-breaking cold and facing the threat of icy snow, I found the parking lot of the darkened UW-Milwaukee Innovation Campus in Wauwatosa. To my relief, I also found the promised shuttle to take me to the site of Wild Space Dance Company’s latest site-specific performance, Everything in Its Place. It was an imposing, red brick, three-story fortress—the former administration building of an early 20th-century Milwaukee County agriculture school. It was designed by the famed Milwaukee architect Alexander Eschweiler, whose many works include the Charles Allis Art Museum and the Wisconsin Gas Company building. The top floor is now called the Echelon Ballroom, part of the new Echelon Apartment Complex.
It looks like an unadorned church—a place to behave, not dance—perfectly symmetrical with high gothic arches, dark wood molding, no-nonsense beige walls and identical lofts and stairs at either end. I’ve learned to expect choreographer Debra Loewen to move her audiences around, but here our place was constant. We sat in rows along one of the room’s identical long sides, facing forward. The only oddities were small paper bags hanging high up, clipped to clotheslines on pulleys from those lofts at both ends.
It was a startling start: the sharp, overlapping voices of women counting, as if playing hide and seek, while other women raced fiercely through the areas. Dancer Mauriah Kraker slowly took focus, looking at us, at the room, at the exposed women dancers who all began looking, perhaps for hiding places? Those others were Katelyn Altmann, Brea Graber, Amanda Laabs, Lindsey Ruenger, Maggie Seer and Jimmi Weyneth, all wonderful. Loewen gave them lots to do in solos and different combinations. The only man, Warren Enström, remained separated, playing bassoon non-melodically and drawing frightening sounds from doors, walls and radiators. I was gripped from start to finish, thanks to the compelling performances and Loewen’s kaleidoscopic structuring.
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The choreography seemed subconsciously driven. The performers were serious young people in a place for kings and angels, where they had no place. They had one another, but did they? Even that was never certain. Nothing lasted here. They tested gestures, positions and relationships. They waited, panicked, counted and hid. At one point, little pillows were tossed from balconies to the floor: brief respite? Some of the paper bags were dropped: fleeting treats? It’s a difficult time in the world.
