Wild Space Welcomes Everyone to ‘InSite: Dances for Washington Park’

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“What we love about being here is that this is the center of the city and you just feel like you’re in this isolated place of loveliness,” Deb Loewen says as we walk along the north side of Washington Park where on Sunday, May 22 her Wild Space Dance Company will give two free performances of a new, site-specific work called InSite: Dances for Washington Park.

The park was designed and constructed by Frederick Law Olmsted at the end of the 19th century. “Olmsted designed it,” Loewen continues, “to connect with his Riverside Park and Lake Park. His whole thing was to make sure that anybody could come here and walk.”

Wild Space was the first performing arts company to offer live performances during the COVID lockdown, when Loewen created her series of “Drive-In Dance” events in city parking lots. Audiences watched from their cars. She’s created site specific dance work indoors and out for most of Wild Space’s 35 years, but since the pandemic, she says, “Working outside and keeping a relationship to the environment means so much to me.” Rain or shine, the show will go on. Bring an umbrella, if necessary.

What’s new this time is that Loewen is mentoring guest choreographers Alisha Jihn and Tisiphani Mayfield as they create, collaboratively and individually, the different parts of this performance. Both women have danced in Wild Space shows in recent years and Jihn also dances in this one. She’s a member, as well, of Danceworks Performance MKE which just closed its run of the collaboratively created Sobriquet. Mayfield, a former member of Ko-Thi Dance Company, is the dance teacher for MPS’ Lincoln Center of the Arts. Her specialties, she says, are jazz, tap, hip hop and West African dance. She calls her style Afro-jazz.

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For this show, audiences will assemble in the bandshell parking lot, and then be guided through a series of sites with a range of viewing angles and elevations. Scenes are short, 10 minutes at most; then an easy walk through nature to the next scene.

In every direction, spring is blooming. Birds cry. Wind rustles. Water laps. It’s so encouraging. The places for dancing were chosen, Jinn says, “because they jumped out to each of us.”

The first is a shallow ravine with a narrow crossbridge. Above it is a ridge of thick brush and trees through which dancers will find their way onto the bridge. Mayfield is the primary choreographer here. The piece is intended to honor the people who’ve inhabited this piece of land.  There’s the idea of “give and take,” says Jinn who’ll be dancing.

The overlooked backside of the bandshell provides the next playing space. It’s filled with the names of great Western composers. “All men,” Loewen notes. Several of the broadly inclusive and excellent Wild Space cast will perform on a thin ledge midway up.

Willows and a couple of great blue herons are among the inhabitants of the next dance site, a reed-filled lagoon where a collaboratively choreographed piece will unfold.

Jihn is the primary choreographer of the next dance, set on a gorgeously grassy, tree-covered hillside. “It’s inspired,” she says, “by the memories many people have of playing childhood games in parks.” The trees play a role.

The multi-part finale involves a stone bridge, a new view of the lagoon, some very tall reeds, and bench seating with a view, across a different branch of water, to a dance set against the lovely architecture of the Urban Ecology Center. InSite: Dances for Washington Park is made in partnership with the Center. The performance is part of Olmstead 200, a nationwide celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great landscape architect and anti-slavery activist.

And it won’t end there. As audiences stroll back to the parking lot, they’ll experience what Mayfield calls “whispers” of the show’s main ideas, and a closing moment yet to be created.

To reach the Washington Park Bandshell parking lot, turn south onto 45th St. from W. Lloyd St., then curve west. Shows are at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 22. Admission is free. Visit wildspacedance.org.