Photo courtesy of Wild Space Dance Company
Boswell Book Company’s bookstore on Downer Avenue was alive with customers on a Sunday afternoon. I’d stopped in to see the Wild Space Dance Company’s rehearsal of Off the Page, choreographer Debra Loewen’s new site-specific dance work about books and reading. She’s staging it throughout the store. Customers quietly wandered, focusing on books and their own thoughts and lives, while dancers practiced synchronized moves along an aisle in the non-fiction section, as if searching for the right answers there.
In the mystery book section, Loewen sat on the carpeted floor in a circle of dancers. She’d repositioned the reading area—sofa, chairs and table—to create a modest dance floor. The store’s patrons took it in stride, using the furniture for reading, accepting the artists’ presence. Loewen was working with some of the index cards that the bookstore fastens to shelves beneath many of the books. They’re filled with handwritten thoughts about that book’s content and value. Fragments of these “recommendations,” as Loewen terms them, will introduce some dances. Others will be prefaced by brief excerpts from books, read aloud by Mauriah Kraker and Flora Coker, or spoken by dancers from memory.
“My feeling is that dance should tell the story,” Loewen tells me as we tour the store. “One of my favorite books is St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. It’s a fabulous short story by Karen Russell. Imagine eight girl dancers out here, and I say, ‘this is a story about a pack of girls raised by wolves and taken by the warden to live in a convent with the nuns.’ That’s your frame of reference: look at this dance thinking about girls raised by wolves.”
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Off the Page will begin with the entire audience gathered for a substantial, multi-storied performance in the mystery section, after which the audience will divide into five viewing groups. Each group will be taken to a discreet area of the bookstore. Five entirely different short performances of identical length will be repeated five times, as each audience group moves from one section to the next. The sections are fiction, cooking, magazines, children’s books and an aisle of non-fiction and special interest books.
Loewen describes the choreography as “my usual fragmentation and juxtaposition.” Audience members will, of course, make their own connections between genres, specific titles, spoken text and movement. In the fiction section, dancers Elisabeth O’Keefe Roskopf and Tori Isaac incorporate memorized texts from “fiction that’s particular to their interests,” Loewen says, including work by local authors Martha Bergland and Susan Firer. In the cooking section, Emily Bolwerk dances and speaks a foodless cooking demonstration that Loewen, in a tantalizing voice, calls “strange.” In the magazine section, Jimmi Weyneth and Molly Kiefer each read the same magazine. “They’re absolutely in unison in how they look at it, how they read it, how they flip the pages. It’s a kind of meditation,” Loewen says.
In the non-fiction aisle, Brea Graber, Danielle Lohuis and Lindsey Ruenger appear and disappear down aisles, pulling books and perusing appendices. “It’s the most abstract section,” Loewen confirms. The children’s section has tall windows, the better to watch Jenni Reinke performing outdoors. Composer Warren Enström is toying with music boxes and books that make animal sounds for accompaniment.
The entire audience will regroup in the mystery section for the show’s finale. It begins as sheer, book-driven dance virtuosity and ends in “a quiet tableau of the way people act in a bookstore,” Loewen says. “It’s a little like coming to Summerfest. When people come in, nobody knows at first where they want to go. It’s overstimulating.”
