Photo courtesy of Wild Space Dance Company
A Room with a Story - Wild Space Dance Company
Wild Space Dance Company performs 'A Room with a Story' (2025)
The soundscape for Wild Space Dance Company’s newest work, A Room Shaped Story, is as rich and unpredictable as the choreography. Among the things we listen to are the words of Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle —books we hippies treasured in their day. He speaks about the classic story arc, which he deems artificial. “It pretends we know more about life than we really do. We pretend to know what the good news is and what the bad news is; but all we do is echo the feelings of people around us.”
The 10 “stories” that unfolded during this intermission-free, 75-minute piece exemplified that belief. The ending felt climactic, but even there, we couldn’t be sure “what was the goodness and what was the badness.” Nothing was certain on opening night last weekend at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, except for the unending creativity of eight human lives with a table and chair, three ever-shifting walls, lighting, shadows, and sounds.
The walls-on-wheels were in near-continuous motion, right, left, forward, back, angled or square to the audience. They might become a smaller room within the room of the stage. One wall of sheer cloth showed shadows of whatever stood behind it. The other walls were solid. The table and chair were repositioned frequently and served as props or additional stages for dancing. It was pure surrealism, a dream both thoroughly engaging and perplexing. You can recognize the elements, but who’s to say what it’s about or what to make of it?
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Ever Changing Motion
Photo courtesy of Wild Space Company
A Room with a Story - Wild Space Dance Company
Wild Space Dance Company performs 'A Room with a Story' (2025)
The ever-turning walls and changing movement images resembled a kaleidoscope. In theatre terms, it might be called a happening. It’s clearly born from improvisation by the dancers, but the choreography is firmly set. The dancers’ complex interactions would demand that. Movements happen side-by-side with sound accompaniment that ranges from Beethoven to the iconoclastic John Cage, minimalistic Steve Reich, and lots of contemporary avant garde folks such as Ethel and eighth blackbird (sic).
I’ll call this dance work avant garde. It might be about storytelling without telling any story. It might look like storytelling might look if the story were about what happens moment by moment to eight dancers and an audience during a live 75-minute performance. It’s beyond words. It’s hand moves, foot moves, a leap, lift, or balance here or there. It’s silliness, sobriety, bombast, stillness, speed, intensity, surprise, and magic. It’s appearance and its opposite with few rules. Just stay in the building somewhere. An exploration of some possibilities. No arc.
Asking, Laughing
Photo courtesy of Wild Space Dance Company
A Room with a Story - Wild Space Dance Company
Wild Space Dance Company performs 'A Room with a Story'
It kept me thinking, kept me asking, sometimes laughing, sometimes saying “wow!” The longer I watched, the more I could see reflections of my own crazy life, the way I move around my house, my interactions with my partner. I could see the baby chicks we’re raising running, pecking, cuddling, all according to some instinct. They know what they’re doing but I certainly don’t.
It’s about the possibility of creating your life. It’s big. Yet to describe the movements would be meaningless, I think. Four dancers held the four legs of the table on the small of their four backs, and crawled?
It makes more sense to me to ask, “who are these people who are dancing?” Their names are Katelynn Altmann, Angela Frederick, Cuauhtli Ramirez Castro, Ashley Ray Garcia, Zoe Glise, Jenni Reinke, Jamie Riddle, and Dan Schuchart. Altmann, Garcia, and Schuchart choreographed “in collaboration with the dancers.” The creative process included countless hours of repositioning walls and furniture to explore their powers jointly and collectively. Movement was derived from prompted improvs, shaped, edited, arranged and rearranged.
I thought about my own experience as a dancer in a Wild Space show. It was company founder Debra Loewen’s 2023 retirement dance, as she handed the company’s artistic directorship to Schuchart in a four-dance concert titled History of the Future. In our dance, Loewen performed with Simone Ferro, Flora Coker, and me, all elderly performance artists. We made the dance from prompts Loewen brought to rehearsals, such as “something you remember from your childhood,” or “something bad that happened to you.” We’d improvise our little stories, and Loewen would combine, contrast, and shape our pantomimes into something boundless. I knew the sources. I could live truly. The audience was on its own.
I figured we old folks were portraits of possible futures for the youngsters in the rest of the concert. We could be their future history. Back to Vonnegut, would the kids find that good or bad news? I could only hope.
There were two other Vonnegut passages in A Room Shaped Story, about the similarities between the stories of Cinderella and Hamlet with their vastly different outcomes. Again, “We don’t know enough about life to know what the good news and the bad news is. And we respond to it still.”
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