‘Everyone is Welcome’ at Wild Space’s In-Site Concert

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In the 19th century, the Native American burial mounds occupying sites in and around Forest Home Cemetery were leveled to make way for the graves of Jacob Best, Valentine Blatz and many other prominent early settlers of Milwaukee. But before long the cemetery became a place of tolerance, the resting place for people of various faiths. Now, Forest Home Cemetery and Arboretum (as it’s been rebranded) is a place for the living to gather in happiness as well as sorrow.

This, according to Deb Loewen, was the reason Forest Home will be the site for the upcoming performance by Wild Space Dance Company. In-Site: Everyone is Welcome is the latest episode in the company’s long history of performing in nonconventional locations. It’s also the second dance concert shaped in part by Wild Space’s Choreographic Exchange Program, a project for mentoring Milwaukee choreographers of color and giving them a stage to present original work reflecting their communities.

Everyone is Welcome will include performances by dancers of Black, Hmong, Taiwanese and Mexican heritage. Loewen, Wild Space’s founding director, and Dan Schuchart, the company’s codirector along with Monica Rodero, want to be clear: there will be no dancing on anyone’s grave during Everyone is Welcome. The performers and the audience will move respectfully from place to place within Forest Home, taking advantage of the enchanting landscape to perform in a bowl-like depression, a clearing around an especially beautiful tree and around (and in!) a pond.

Site specific performances such as Everyone is Welcome “make me think about how the body moves in different ways when interacting with landscape or architecture,” Schuchart says. “It opens up a different level of possibility than performing on a proscenium stage. It can invite different audiences to experience dance—people who might never come to a theater. We can make movement to fit the sloping surfaces at Forest Home. The audience’s perspective is taken for granted in a theater space. Here, we give people many [vantage point] choices.”

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Everyone is Welcome will begin with pre-show talks by America’s best-known historian of Milwaukee, John Gurda. One hundred chairs will be provided with standing room available on the grass. From there, the audience will move in procession to the first performance, led by dancer-guides. Loewen stresses that everything is wheelchair accessible and “we’re not asking the audience to walk long distances. It will be easy to migrate from place to place.”

The evening performances will begin at 7:30 p.m., the golden hour as the setting sun makes its magic in the wooded setting. By 8:30, in time for the final acts of Everyone is Welcome, lanterns will be lit.

The funeral traditions of the participating choreographers will not be enacted but, as Schuchart says, they are “part of the conversation” shaping the performance. Loewen adds that the Forest Home location is not meant to imply a gothic or morbid mood. On one level, she says, “it’s a celebration of lives that have been lived.”

Performances are free but reservations must be made in advance due to limited space at eventbrite.com/e/insite-everyone-is-welcome-tickets-632915456167.

Visit their website at wildspacedance.org.

Everyone is Welcome will be performed 7:30 p.m. June 16, and 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. June 17, at Forest Home Cemetery and Arboretum, 2405 W. Forest Home Ave.