Photo Credit: Catherine Bell
A Year of Dancing Dangerously will be the first indoor performance for a live audience by Debra Loewen’s Wild Space Dance Company since their site-specific show at Boswell bookstore closed in the hours before the March 2020 lockdown. Beginning in July 2020, the company presented an extraordinary three-show season of drive-in concerts in city parking lots, the first post-lockdown performances by a Milwaukee arts group.
Audiences watched from their socially distanced cars, listening to accompaniment on their cellphones. As dusk fell and the city’s lights appeared, masked and carefully distanced dancers in ever-changing, tightly structured patterns and groupings danced, vital and ghostly, side-lighted by car headlights.
Those shows were entirely made on site. Everyone stayed distanced. Loewen used a megaphone to choreograph and direct. The last in the series, Under The Freeway, was danced in mid-November 2020. Viewers kept their car heaters running but dancers battled cold as well as covid.
A Year of Dancing Dangerously nods to all of that, Loewen tells me as she plays with a toy-size model of the parking lot where Under The Freeway surreally took place. Using toy cars, dolls, and small flashlights for headlights, she calls that show up in a charming fashion. These toys will appear in A Year of Dancing Dangerously and find echoes in the dancing, but in new choreography that’s fully understandable in the new context. “It isn’t an insider thing,” Loewen emphasized. “We make it so it’s not strange.”
“For me, it’s about how dangerous it was to even move, much less dance,” she says the new work. “We were dancing, each in our own capacity, all over the place, but not with anybody. I wanted to have nods to the parking lots shows because I think they’re an aspect of what you do when there’s danger. You figure it out. You decide, OK, I’m not going to be stopped by this. I can work through this.
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“Oh, that just gave me a thought,” she says, and excuses herself to write it down. She’s in the midst of creating the show as we talk. She resumes:
“So we started with the world we’re in now, and getting to know each other physically in the space. We start with the idea of touch. It takes a long time to touch. You have to know who you’re touching, how wide your hands are, how long you stay with your hands there. It can’t just be something you’re doing next. It has to be real. That’s what feels so vulnerable.”
Movement Based
Photo Credit: Catherine Bell
“The piece is movement-based, but it’s a very clear story,” she continues. “It has a flow that moves people together to a new place. What it adds up to is that we have to have each other; that we can’t survive without one another.”
A Year of Dancing Dangerously has underlying nods to a much longer history. The site for Loewen’s return to live performance is UWM’s Mitchell Hall Studio 254, the site where Wild Space made its debut in 1987. This return takes place at the place of beginning. “I’m bringing a lot of years, a lot of dancers, that first company. It won’t be overt, but I’m mining my own history for this,” she says with deep feeling.
In an unusual move, she’ll appear in the show. “I’m going to perform in cameos or whatever, I’m still working on that,” she says. Her collaborating dancers are Katelyn Altman, Brea Graber, Alisha Jihn, Lindsay Ruenger, Nicole Spence, Yeng Vang-Strath and UWM intern Jasmine Uras.
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 2-4 at UWM Mitchell Hall 254, 3203 N. Downer Ave. For ticket and covid safety information, visit wildspacedance.org or call the UWM Box Office at 414-229-4308.
