Review- Wild Space Dance

As anyone who has sat through a “Barney” marathon knows, a little happiness goes a long way. So some suspicion about a dance company taking on the theme of “happiness” in an evening-length work might be warranted. But Wild Space isn’t just any dance company, and their new 80-minute performance, “Speaking of Happiness,” which debuted Thursday at the Steimke Theatre, was deliciously witty and completely free of warm fuzzies.
Unless, of course, you get tingles watching dancers take such pleasure in sheer inventive movement. In the Steimke, choreographers Deborah Loewen, Dan Schuchart and Monica Rodero (along with their dancer-collaborators) have a relatively contained canvas—at least compared to Wild Space’s usual site-specific venues: huge ballrooms, parks, bridges or islands. Here, the choreographers—with help from Jan Kellog’s evocative lighting design—create striking compositions out of simple elements.
Rodero and Schuchart’s opening duet sets the tone. She enters with a cupcake topped with a lit birthday candle, and its sheer presence gives her such pleasure she can only bring her self to taste a finger-full of frosting. But her object of happiness is his source of envy, and the limb-tangling duet is not only great fun to watch (keep the cupcake alight!), but a savvy and sinuous metaphor for the interplay of desire and contentment, envy and satisfaction.
The childlike mood of the opening returns again and again. Schuchart’s duet with Javier Marchan captures the joy of adolescent play (here, two hooded sweatshirts inspire the action and physical innovation), but also the hints of aggression and power behind it.
Some of the larger, ensemble sections of the piece were a bit ragged, probably due to a rehearsal time crunch. But what Loewen and her collaborators do so well is create rich moments in time that extend beyond mere physical beauty. Here, there were moments that explored relationships and the possibilities of “shared happiness,” all the way up to the broadest social questions. At one point, a dancer played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on tuned wine glasses as the tray of glasses was gingerly carried across the stage. If there’s a more telling metaphor for the possibility of true “brotherhood” in Schiller’s expansive sense of the word, I’d be hard pressed to think of it.