Photo by Jeff Pearcy
'Beyond the Shimmer' (2026) - Wild Space Dance Company
Wild Space Dance Company performs 'Beyond the Shimmer' (2026)
It’s a delightful coincidence that Wild Space Dance Company’s new work, Beyond the Shimmer, inspired as it is by thoughts of viewing Earth from outer space, will open as the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II complete their 10-day flight around the moon.
Beyond The Shimmer started as a 25-minute contemporary dance piece created by UWM dance professor Dan Schuchart for eight of his students to perform in the department’s Winterdances concert in 2025. Schuchart, of course, is also a dancer, choreographer and current co-artistic director of the 39-year-old experimental Wild Space.
“I haven’t done this before,” he tells me at a Brady Street café, “but I really liked that piece. I wanted to revisit it and see what else was there. I felt like there was more opportunity in that work, so for this Wild Space season I decided to reset it on our company and expand it to a 60-minute piece.”
And so the new Beyond the Shimmer is both main event and title of the concert running April 10-11 at UWM’s Jan Serr Studio with its knock-out view of the downtown skyline as background. The show will open with a world premiere solo created specifically for Schuchart by guest choreographer Alexandra Barbier, titled few things ahead of time: Dan’s Wild Space.
Outer Space Inspired
“When I started work on the student production,” Schuchart continues, “I was thinking about outer space as this metaphor for postmodern or avant garde art, and how some people feel disoriented by it, or don’t have a foothold on how to approach it. But as the piece developed, it became more about how we have this beautiful world, and how sometimes we really need to zoom out our perspective to see the magic in the everyday. Outer space became a metaphoric way of thinking wide and vast about the here and the now.”
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The original production included texts by UWM playwriting student Ambrose Schulte—some narrative, some poetic, all outer-space inspired. In the new version, additional texts by Brian Rott, intrepid co-founder and co-director of Quasimondo Physical Theatre, are interwoven with Schulte’s musings. The texts periodically float in projections over the dancers. Schuchart views them as “memories coming back, or new ways of considering a situation.”
It’s a highly visual piece, he tells me, with unusual uses of flashlights, mirror balls, mylar blankets and a big fan.
Schuchart was also inspired by Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, a fictional meditation on a day in the life of six astronauts orbiting earth in the International Space Station. He’d present favorite passages to the dancers, let them respond improvisationally, and choreograph the movement accordingly.
For example, he says, “On the space station, you go around the planet 16 times in 24 hours. Every forty-five minutes is a day to a night. The thing I love about the book,” he continues, “and I think it’s woven into the dance, is that an astronaut’s day is so prescribed. They have all these things they have to do, so it becomes almost mundane. But every time they look out the window, there’s something magical and magnificent.”
Schuchart insists that we can have that experience, if we’re open to it. “Our days can become mundane but if we look at something from a different vantage point, suddenly there’s this kind of beautiful magic of color and texture. That’s what this piece does. Through a twist of perspective or a shift in the light, all of a sudden there’s an explosion of this miraculous shimmer all over the world.”
Milwaukee at RADfest
In early March, the company performed the original 25-minute work at the 17th annual RADfest Alternative Dance Festival in Kalamazoo. Wild Space was one of two companies, from over 60 applicants, to have their work highlighted in this international festival. “It was a good Milwaukee showing,” Schuchart says. “And it gave me good information about how we could weave another world through that original material.”
Alexandra Barbier is a dance professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. She and Schuchart met last summer when she visited Milwaukee to work with her partner’s MFA thesis concert at UWM. Here’s an edit from an email she sent me.
“I had just lost both of my grandparents. I was questioning if I wanted to continue being a dance artist. After much crying, I stared out at Lake Michigan, and I came up with few things ahead of time as a way to rekindle my interest in dance. I’m creating solos in a 48-hour process on performers I admire. Dan’s is my third solo. Knowing nothing about his movement proclivities helped me to NOT plan anything ahead of our time together. And turns out, he’s an incredible mover and performer. I was blown away by the choices he made when I gave him improvisational prompts.”
Performances are at 7:30pm on April 10 and 11 at the Jan Serr Studio, Kenilworth Square East, 2155 N Prospect Avenue. For tickets, visit wildspacedance.org
