Wild Space Dance Company Embodies the Work and Process of Visual Artist William Kentridge

×

Expand

Photo by Jeff Pearcy via Wild Space Dance Company - Facebook

Wild Space Dance Company - Dances: At the Edge of Understanding

Wild Space Dance Company - Dances: At the Edge of Understanding

Dances: At the Edge of Understanding is the perfect title for the site specific dreamscape Wild Space Dance Company created last week in the spacious parking lot of the Warehouse Art Museum on West St. Paul Avenue. Watching it, I felt that I was flying through an art museum filled with fascinating works I didn’t have the time to study and may never see again. That’s not a criticism. This dance was meant, I think, to keep me thinking for a while. I want to experience it again—any return would inspire new connections and pleasures—but the combination of this surprising setting, perfect weather, haunting soundscape and transfixing performances by sixteen dancers is likely unrepeatable.

Created by company founder Deb Loewen with her new co-artistic director Dan Schuchart and the dancers, it was a meditation on the Warehouse Art Museum’s landmark exhibition of works by the revered South African artist William Kentridge. That exhibit, titled “See for Yourself,” runs through Dec. 16. I want to note that in November, the museum’s founders John Shannon and Jan Serr are bringing Kentridge to Milwaukee, along with a play and a music concert by his South African collaborators.

As for the dance, the structure was mind-bending. Wild Space divided the parking lot into three, widely separated viewing areas, each with chairs for seating. One area faced a tall garage with a door that raised and lowered electronically, revealing a small interior playing space with a draped backdrop.  Another was the very high brick side wall of an adjacent warehouse. The third was a metal fence that separated the lot from a railroad track. White dress shirts hung from its openings. Arriving audience members had free choice among the viewing areas. Then, at intervals during the performance, everyone moved to their second, then third, choice.

Different Perspectives

Each dancer’s story used all three areas, often several times, in every segment. I started at the fence. I was met by dancers who’d soon run off to who knows where and do whatever. In the following segments, I’d see them enter very different scenes for very different experiences. So depending on the chosen sequence, audience members saw different shows.

Some dance movements were close to mime: sketching, erasing, painting and assembling. Sometimes dancers were the artworks. Sometimes the movement was all about line. Sometimes dancers became involved in watching other dancers or the sky or landscape. Newspapers were an omnipresent prop. Dancers would read them, crush them, toss them or stuff them into the metal fence.

What to make of it? In a tour of the Kentridge exhibit I’d enjoyed earlier, led by curator Melanie Herzog, I learned that Kentridge wanted viewers to look at the works from many angles, and to question or otherwise interact with them. He valued ambiguity and contradiction in the works because they foster engagement. He’d draw, then roughly erase and re-draw over the original, sometimes repeatedly. The result begs deeper thinking; it suggests a questioning or questing mind.

I learned that he doesn’t separate art from life. His work was his way of interacting with South Africa’s colonial history, with the experience and legacy of apartheid, with the impact of the Holocaust on his Jewish family and the “triumphs and laments,” as he calls them, of immigration, so fundamental to the whole noble and tragic story of human existence. I learned he’d walk in circles in his studio for hours to bring to mind the images he’d draw or sculpt or video or turn into puppets.

All of that was, somehow, in the Wild Space dance, but sweetened by live performance. Dancers shared some movement vocabulary, mostly connected to drawing and newspapers. There were brief episodes of unison dancing. The newspapers brought thoughts of our current moment, but for me that was already present in a widespread sadness of the dancers’ eyes and carriage. Sad history was also present in Tim Russell’s ambient soundscape of static-laden World War II radio excerpts, including bits of German tunes I’d learned in childhood.

The most-experienced dancers, especially Simone Ferro, Gina Laurenzi, Jenni Reinke, Katelyn Altmann and co-director Schuchart, gave powerful performances I won’t forget. Loewen even made a brief appearance at the fence, carrying a Kentridge piece that played a role in the choreographic design. And all the others—Britni Fletcher, Shirley Gilbert, Alex Dougherty, Zoe Glise, Dijon Kirkland, Ida Lucchesi, Jessica Lueck, Jamie Riddle, Kalista Roling, Shannon Stanczak, and Jasmine Uras, made important contributions, each in their own way.

Here’s to a return engagement.

For a review of William Kentridge “See for Yourself ,” visit shepherdexpress.com/culture/visual-art/see-william-kentridge-for-yourself-at-warehouse-art-museum.