“When I was just out of college I worked with a musician, and we built this leotard that had movement-sensitive switches on it,” says Debra Loewen, choreographer and artistic director of Milwaukee’s Wild Space Dance Company. “It was hooked up to a computer, which was hooked up to a synthesizer. So every sound you heard, I created by my movement.”
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Eisen also expects the touring groups to “keep the work simple.” Though Link’s Hall was recently renovated, watching performances there is still a little like watching in your living room. Loewen, who usually performs in a proscenium theater, plans to rework several pieces. “The trick is to distill, not deflate them,” she says. “A proscenium can absorb very full movement in space. That can get on top of you in a small space.
Though Loewen has shown her work at Link’s Hall twice before, in the late 70s and in 1984 in a solo improv concert, this is the first time her five-year-old company will appear in Chicago. The group has on occasion done a full evening of improvisation, but there will be only one improv piece on this program, Ready/Set, which adapts musical structures to dance. “There’s a section called ‘Harmony in Thirds and Fifths,’” says Loewen. “We asked each other: What does proximity mean to dancers? How does it feel to be that close in harmony and then merge or pull away from harmony?”
The Water Last, also a “very serious” dance, was made during the gulf war. But the evolution of this piece is more elusive. “It was odd, working during a crisis like that. Here I had this opportunity, being in this warm studio with all these wonderful people that I love–it was very sad, it really affected the work. The only thing to do was to bury myself in the physical ritual, to come to terms with that relationship since I couldn’t control the other stuff. I put a lot of emotion into just the movement itself. As opposed to making a statement. It was not the time to make a statement–I didn’t have any words.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jim Brozek.
