Wild Space Dance Company’s New Travel Plans

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Photo via Wild Space Dance Company

Wild Space Dance at Davidson Park

Wild Space Dance at Davidson Park

Davidson Park just opened this past June on the Harley-Davidson Corporate Campus at 37th Street and Juneau Avenue. With an amphitheater that fills the block between Juneau and Highland, it’s a staggering sight. The artful brickwork, native plantings, fanciful playground, hills and byways offer countless possibilities for one-of-a-kind dance art, which makes it a really exciting choice by Wild Space Dance Company for a site-specific dance performance. 

Site specific dance has been the Wild Space specialty for nearly 40 years. Audiences travel from spot to spot through whatever fascinating space the dance creatively explores. And this one’s free, even the parking. Wild Space just asks that you register at https://insitecycles.eventbrite.com

InSite: Cycles is the double-edged title. It’s a collaborative work by some of Milwaukee’s best contemporary dance artists under the leadership of artistic director Dan Schuchart. The show also features a solo by Cedric Gardner, the nationally acclaimed dance artist, film and TV actor, and long-time inspiration for youngsters at the Milwaukee Boys and Girls Clubs.

Available and Accessible

“Our InSite Program,” Schuchart explains, “is meant to make contemporary dance available and accessible in different neighborhoods of Milwaukee, and to people who might not be able to make it to a theatre. They also let our dancers learn and play with site-based work, experiment, investigate their own ideas, choose what compels them, and collaborate on the rest.

“Harley designed this place for performances,” he continues. “It’s set up for touring road shows. There’s full electric power. They really want this to be a gathering place for the community. The first Harley motorcycle was made here.”

In a preshow talk 30 minutes before each performance, a Harley-Davidson Foundation historian will describe the company’s development in this two-block area over the last century and a quarter.

Serenity Garden

Schuchart also asked for a speaker from the Potawatomi Tribe to give a land acknowledgement. The Tribe partnered with Harley-Davidson to design the Serenity Garden, a place of quiet and native Wisconsin plantings just above the amphitheater. A major powwow that weekend interfered, but the Tribe provided a statement for Schuchart to read preshow.

At show time, the audience will gather in the amphitheater’s center, called the Hub. Seventeen dancers will perform above and around them for as far as the eye can see, accompanied by guitar, harmonica and saxophone players led by the ever-inventive percussionist Tim Russell.

Then the audience will form two groups that will travel in opposite directions through the grand site and see four choreographed dances and several sideshow surprises. The musicians will join as troubadours. Everyone will cross paths at midpoint where Gardner will dance his solo in and on a giant metal sculpture. The journey will end at the Hub, where the groups will rejoin to enjoy a finale.

Schuchart is lead choreographer for the opening dance and finale. Cuauhtli Ramirez Castro, Dijon Kirkland, and Elisabeth Roskopf are fashioning the landmarks. 

Rocks and Logs

Ramirez Castro’s setting is the children’s playground built of rocks and logs. There’s a slide, a climbing wall, a unique jungle gym, eccentric monkey bars. “I’m thinking about it as a game,” says Ramirez Castro as we explore his staging area. “I created tidbits of material that the dancers have as a bank of movements to pull from, as they like. I’m setting intersecting pathways through the playground to give them different moments of connection, appearing and disappearing, and letting them play for eight minutes. There’s the concept of cycles as repetition, and movements like revving a motorcycle.”

Kirkland explained via email that her grandmother had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and loved taking trips with her motorcycle club, meeting people from across the country and Canada. “As a child,” Kirkland wrote, “it was such a pleasure to see her enjoying life that way. Bikers often meet people from different backgrounds, and everyone they meet somehow becomes a part of them. My dancers tell that story.”

Roskopf showed me the wooden bridge, stone stairs, and grassy slope that comprise her staging area. This is her final year of grad school in dance at UWM and Schuchart encouraged her to use this as research for her thesis. She was adopted as a South Korean baby by an American couple and raised here. 

“When I saw this bridge,” she tells me, “I immediately felt that this dance could be part of my personal journey, not just for my thesis but for my life research. It’s about the question of how do I bridge the divide between the two cultures I’m a part of. So I’m choreographing a six-minute solo. I’m going on and off the bridge, showing how I’m seeing and navigating hope, and just thinking about the complexities that I carry as a transracial and transnational adoptee, about being in this liminality of time and space, this in-between-ness, and discovering my sense of self.”

Performances are Oct. 18-19 with 6:30 p.m. talk and 7 p.m. performance, and Oct. 19 with 3:30 p.m. talk and 4 p.m. performance, at Davidson Park, 3725 W. Juneau Ave. Performances are free but RSVP is required at insitecycles.eventbrite.com. Free public parking is available just east of the site on Juneau Ave. For more information, visit wildspacedance.org.