Photo Credit: Catherine Bell
It was last Thursday evening, and we’d just begun to face the coronavirus pandemic and the belated call for social distancing. The audience for each of only three performances of Wild Space Dance Company’s new and unique Off the Page at Boswell Book Co. was limited in the planning to 80, since the store is small. So this show was a late-winter flower, in bloom for just three days, witnessed only by the few who knew of it and risked the visit. And in a bookstore redolent with nostalgia, anxiety fostered fellowship.
We were seated at the store’s rear, facing the mystery book section. In a quiet voice, as if in church (or its cousin, the library), the woman behind it all, Debra Loewen, thanked her dancers and crew, the bookstore’s owner, Daniel Goldin, and all of us for our part in this warm event. She’d assigned each audience member to one of five separate groups, with instructions to travel with our group to five different sections of the store, cued by recorded music. The performance began disarmingly.
One by one, the nine women performers dressed in blacks and grays entered the space like bookstore customers, looking at mystery and true crime titles, pulling books from shelves and turning pages. Soon, you could see that all of their movements were tightly choreographed, accompanied by the sound of their shoes on the floor’s rough carpet; something like soft-shoe dancing. In a burst, all nine women were talking at once to one another in an excited group, showing each other passages of writing they loved. The style was dance theater or performance art, and that remained the case.
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Composer Warren Enström used the store’s rolling book cart as a musical instrument. Soon, Flora Coker and Mauriah Kraker appeared from the stacks to read different evocative passages, their words juxtaposed with eccentric movements from dancers. The subject was the value and impact of shared words, and the fact that what we read is so important to our identities. All that followed was sheer delight.
Viewed through windows, Jenni Reinke was the laughable, eccentric lady of a thousand children’s stories on the sidewalk outside. Emily Bolwerk’s cooking demonstration—with women’s rubber pasties as chicken breasts—would triumph in comedy clubs. Special interest books proved irresistible; magazines inspired deep conformity; fiction was unforgettable; art heals; printed words take space. I’ve run out.
