Deb Loewen and the Wild Space Dance Company have always been interested in spaces and places, and they usually take their dance theater to the place in question, performing “on-site” at historic and resonant buildings and landscapes. So when the company planned for this year’s performance in the more artificial confines of a theater space, it’s not surprising that they chose the theme of travel.
Riffing on ideas from and reactions to Alain de Botton’s witty and insightful The Art of Travel, Loewen and Wild Space artistic associates Monica Rodero and Dan Schuchart have created a piece as expansive and detailed as a world atlas. That’s what we see, in fact, walking into the Milwaukee Rep’s Steimke Theatre – a wall of maps, maps collaged into a bigger map, and crumpled maps around the floor that seem to have blown in like tumbleweeds.
What the company is after here is not just a piece about travel. It is called, after all, How to Get From Here to There, and the maps suggest a life plan as much as a weekend journey. As always, one of Wild Space’s talents is drawing big ideas from small gestures. The opening vignette features Rodero and Schuchart, dancing to the computerized voice of an auto GPS system. But the directions don’t stop at just “turn left” and “continue on.” It directs the couple’s movements and beyond. It’s one of the many voices we try to listen to when deciding where and when to go.
Elsewhere in the dance we see clusters of people looking off as if a friend is arriving home after an arduous journey. A stylized variation of a tour group, with dancers unclustering and clustering around an ambiguous point of attraction. There’s a funny game of one-upsmanship, with dancers naming the exotic places they’ve traveled to – Bratislava, China, etc. – only to have Jessie Mae Scibek deadpan her highlights: “Madison…Mequon.”
Rodero and Schuchart had a chance to leave Milwaukee with a solid impression. Rodero performed a lovely solo, which began as a sort of geography of the body, a list of scars and marks left by vaccinations, childhood accidents and jellyfish stings. The movement of revealing each mark then becomes the vocabulary of the dance, a kind of celebration of a body’s knockabout journey through time.
Schuchart, as well, has never danced better. He moves with a loose limbed grace and fluidity, but is never showy or precious. Even the most dancerly gestures seem new, something directed and purposeful, but never forceful.
Wild Space will go on, of course. But we’ll miss them.
