Photo: Wild Space Dance Company
Wild Space Dance Company
Wild Space Dance Company
After 35 years, it’s a good time for any organization to reflect on its past and the road ahead. For its 35th season, Wild Space Dance Company will celebrate with a performance called The History of the Future. It’s not a review of the company’s history as much a meditation in motion on persistence, memory, “our collective capacity to embrace time’s relentless pace.”
Wild Space Dance Company 'History of the Future' poster
The 35th season also marks a transition as Deb Loewen steps sideways into her new position as founding director and her associates, Dan Schuchart and Monica Rodero, assume their new roles as co-artistic directors.
“When we started, the focus was on my own work,” Loewen recalls. “The mission changed to incorporate other choreographers and to collaborate with other ‘out there’ people.”
Along the way, Wild Space became distinctive for site-specific dance concerts at locations such as the Marsupial Bridge at the end of Brady Street and the freeway underpass near the Italian Community Center where—in November 2020 during the worst of COVID—her dancers performed in coats and mittens to audience seated in their cars. It was dance as a drive-in theater show.
“I want people to see how dance enhances a space—to create a connection between people and spaces,” she explains. Site-specific performances can enhance our awareness of the physical environment, humanmade as well as natural, in an age when reality flashes past in a blur. Lowen adds, “Milwaukee has always been my muse. I didn’t ask for it—it came to me!”
Loewen, Schuchart and choreographers Katelyn Altmann and Jenni Reinke are working with nine dancers plus a trio of guest performers, veteran Milwaukee performing artists Flora Coker, Simone Ferro and John Schneider. “She is wide open and wants us to make a personal statement about artists our age,” Schneider says. “It was a kind of creative process I never experienced before. Flora, Simone and I look to Deb to determine which of our performances are keepers. The seeds of this is in the kind of physical theater in which Theatre X was well versed.” Coker and Schneider were longtime members of Theatre X, one of Milwaukee’s most venturesome performing arts groups from the late ‘60s through the mid ‘90s.
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Schuchart and Rodero, a married couple, have been with Wild Space since 2002. “I’m constantly surprised by Deb’s new approaches,” he says. “She’s always looking for brand new processes and approaches. We’re in the movement world and we can’t get stuck!”
Wild Space Dance Company performs The History of the Future Dec. 1-3 at UWM Mitchell Hall Studio 254, 3203 N. Downer Ave. for tickets, call the UWM box office at 414-229-4308 or visit psoatickets.universitytickets.com/w/?cid=184.
