Wild Space Dance Company takes its name seriously. For three decades, founder and artistic director Deb Loewen has taken dancers and audience members on creative and wild adventures.
Site specific works, often in places like industrial ruins in the Menomonee Valley, or an old building in the 5th Ward, push the notions of movement, performance and of dance itself.
Fresh Tracks, the company's newest collection of works, runs February 25 - 27 on the top floor of UWM’s Kenilworth East building.
The performance will take place in an open cavernous space with three areas transformed and staged for different events. Three separate performance will take place simultaneously.
This made the music composition a welcome challenge of organized chaos for composer Tim Russell. "The greatest thing about working with Wild Space," he says," and dance in general is just having all of these cool 'what if' situations...This space in particular has been great to work with because it's such a blank canvas."
With so much going on in one place, Lowen explains that Fresh Tracks is meant to be challenging - not just for the dancers, but the audience as well.
"All of the sound can be heard throughout, so what is specific and particular to one area will bleed through and be overhead by an audience with their back to that area in another location," she says. "So very much like the way life in when you hear and over hear things all the time and you don't always think about filtering them out because they're just there. In fact, we are trying to figure out how to make that more emphatic in the performance."
