Photo via Wild Space Dance Company - wildspacedance.org
Wild Space Dance ‘Look Again’
Wild Space Dance ‘Look Again’
It’s no longer news that after 37 years, Wild Space Dance Company’s founder Debra Loewen has passed the artistic directorship of her great experiment in contemporary dance to her longtime collaborators Monica Rodero and Dan Schuchart, a married couple highly skilled as dancers, choreographers, and teachers. After a transitional 2022-23 season, Rodero and Schuchart are now fully at the helm. Look Again is the title of their first season’s first full production. It will run Nov. 30 - Dec. 2 at the UWM Mitchell Hall Studio 254, and will offer world premieres by company choreographers Katelyn Altmann, Tisiphani Mayfield, and Schuchart.
While Look Again is the first Wild Space dance concert of the season, the company has already performed two episodes this fall of a new improvisational series called Choreo Kitchen. As the title suggests, company artists “cook up” dances before our eyes.
It’s a delightful way for Schuchart and Rodero to share with the public something of what matters most to them as the new leaders of one of Milwaukee’s most important dance companies. The events are meant “to shake up our creative process,” as Schuchart put it in his welcome to Choreo Kitchen #2 earlier this month. Part of that shake up comes from including audiences in the Wild Space process of dance creation.
New Ways to Look
Like Choreo Kitchen #1 which took place in October, the setting for #2 was the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network Art & Culture Hub, a spacious café, bar, visual art gallery and performance space in the Historic Third Ward that’s very much worth a visit. More Choreo Kitchens are planned for winter and spring. They offer an intimate look at the processes that result in a concert of dances like Look Again will offer. They also give audiences new ways to look.
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As Wild Space describes Look Again, these premiere works are born from the artists’ memories and from group play, the same kinds of things that inspire Choreo Kitchen improvisations. If the works in Look Again draw on “hindsight, desires, and past dances,” similar ingredients make up a Choreo Kitchen dish. Wild Space dances let us glimpse souls in processes of play, meditation, discovery, bonding, sharing, hiding, and on and on.
The broad Choreo Kitchen recipe is as follows: a small collection of unrelated objects (ingredients) is presented to three choreographers (cooks) and one accompanying musician (lots of spice) a few days before the live performance. Each choreographer gets a two-hour rehearsal with up to three dancers. The musician prepares separately.
At show time, all gather. Each group presents a short but substantial movement exploration to musical accompaniment hot from the oven. Much remains improvised. It’s at best a sketch. Who knows where it might lead, or what the finished work will show?
That’s how Wild Space creates, not just in early rehearsals, but throughout the process – changing, cutting, expanding, shaping, and building a coherent, engaging, hopefully inspiring piece.
Nothing is Rehearsed
As if that weren’t enough, Choreo Kitchen also includes several straight-on group improvisations with guidelines given on the spot by Schuchart. Nothing is rehearsed. The musician accompanies and also performs a separate solo improvisation. The “dinner” closes with a chance to chat freely with artists or audience members, perhaps with a drink at the bar.
Choreo Kitchen #2 was choreographed by Nicole Spence, Cuauhtli Ramirez Castro, and Gina Laurenzi. They also danced, as did Katelyn Altmann, Ashley Ray Garcia, Ida Lucchesi, Jessica Lueck, and Jasmine Uras. They’ll dance again in Look Again, joined by Dijon Kirkland, Shannon Stanczak, Tisiphani Mayfield and Schuchart.
They’re all seasoned dance artists, important members of Milwaukee’s dance community. In the past month, I’ve enjoyed many of them in Danceworks Performance MKE’s Boundless, in Hyperlocal MKE’s Weather Beauty, and of course in Choreo Kitchen #1.
The great Tim Russell single-handedly improvised nearly 90 minutes of music for Choreo Kitchen #2. He used a modular synthesizer, his voice, a thunder tube” that sounds like thunder, a cup and saucer, branches, a bowl of water and a hydrophone -- a microphone used by marine biologists to listen to sounds in the oceans’ depths.
“Look Again” runs Nov. 30-Dec. 2. Visit wildspacedance.org or call 414-271-0307 for performance times and other information.
