The Wild Space Dance-Making of ‘A Room Shaped Story’

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Photo by Jeff Pearcy

'A Room Shaped Story' performed by Wild Space Dance Company

'A Room Shaped Story' performed by Wild Space Dance Company.

The first thing I saw when I entered Wild Space Dance Company’s rehearsal studio in Lincoln School of the Arts were three giant white walls on wheels, two of solid wood and one made of sheer material framed in wood. I’d come to interview co-artistic director Dan Schuchart, and the company dancers and choreographers Katelyn Altmann and Ashley Ray Garcia. In addition to choregraphing, all three are dancing in the company’s new show, A Room Shaped Story. There will be three performances at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre on April 18-19.

We talked a bit about the near-40-year-old Milwaukee company’s recent honors—a February performance at the Midwest Regional Alternative Dance Festival, and a two-year grant to help cover costs for the company’s free, site-specific dance happenings like the one that filled the Davidson Park this past October.

When I asked about the new show, Altmann handed me her written “first thoughts,” which I’m happy to share.

“It’s intimate, it’s bold, it’s sentimental, it’s rich in texture,” she writes. “An ever-changing single room is shaped/painted/littered with different people’s stories and lived experiences. Each dancer has their own trajectory. There isn’t one story. I invite the audience to let go of that narrative. Stories emerge, disappear, interweave, and come back. It’s beautifully complex. People are the heart of a story. It’s personal, relatable, compelling.”

Walls that Move

I ask about the walls. “This will be this season’s more traditional theater show,” Schuchart begins. “But like all Wild Space shows, we can’t have a regular old empty stage. We have these walls that move around, and a table and a little chair, that are very much choreographed into the show. They give a point of view on the actions. Sometimes they divide things, and people can cross between two rooms.”

Altmann continues: “They can shape what’s happening by concealing or revealing. Or push something really far forward. They shift very quickly, and take shadow, light and color. They have their own moments.”

Garcia finishes: “We debated the title of the show, between A Room Shaped Story and A Story Shaped Room.”

Multiple Narratives

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Photo by Jeff Pearcy

'A Room Shaped Story' by Wild Space Dance Company

'A Room Shaped Story' performed by Wild Space Dance Company.

Regarding the multiple narratives, Schuchart says, “The framework has been kind of like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where you’ve got Jimmy Stewart looking into these different apartments. You don’t get the full stories, just a glimpse of the action of different stories unfolding.”

“I like the word sonder,” Garcia says, referring to the title of a dance choreographed by another Wild Space collaborator, Gina Laurenzi. “It’s the idea of people leading lives different than your own, but that are just as complex. Your experience of what’s happening in your world isn’t the same as everyone else’s. And everyone’s linked to their own individual stories simultaneously.”

“One of the prompts I gave the dancers,” she tells me, “was to talk about times you were lonely and how you deal with loneliness. I had them write it out and pass the paper to someone else to act out the story. Then we shaped that with shadows on one side of a wall, while you see the person on the other side making the shadows.”

“Sometimes our prompts might seem very far afield,” Schuchart says. “But when we look at what actually comes forward—the real choices people are making—we can use that as source material to build these abstract narrative happenings. A lot of times, to warm up we’ll put on different music and improvise, and bring in these walls and table and chair,” Schuchart says. “We’ve actually pulled stuff straight from those improvisations. We find it through doing it.”

“Every day it’s different things that people bring which makes it really beautiful,” Garcia adds.

Different Voices

Schuchart describes the process: “Ashley would start something, I would pick it up and work on it, and Katelyn would take it and continue it, maybe build a beginning or fill in the middle. We’d pass it between the three of us, so it has different voices, different initiations and emphases.”

“We’re constructing a wide-ranging soundscape,” he says about the accompaniment. “There are moments where a particular music supports a particular actor. We’re working to have it ebb and flow across events. It’s interesting to have very different pieces in the foreground and background, like in a house where there’s one conversation in the kitchen and another in the living room. There’s recorded text. Some will help frame some of the stories. Some of Ashley’s poetry is layered in.”

Garcia published a book of poetry last year titled Forget Me Not, available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

“The truth,” he concludes, “is you can have this brilliant idea in your head, but when you try to have bodies do it in space, it can totally crumble. It has to be in the moving body.”