Carried Away explores shifting relationships between moving bodies, live music, projected images, Roulette’s unusual performance space and the audience. Known for site-based work, Debra Loewen incorporates architectural structures at hand, providing a shifting perspective of experience. Utilizing both improvisational scores and set material, dancers and musicians navigate the space in an intricate exchange of ideas. Their interactions will be framed with intimate proximity or glimpsed from a distant perspective. Moving and still vignettes occur simultaneously connecting threads of a shared language with music, dance and the built environment, while the audience relocates to new viewing areas. Film loops hint of landscapes- a slow shifting of graphite shards; birds gather and disappear; a large white cat named Douglas watches everyone.
The space prompts visible and invisible plots for unanticipated directions, thwarted plans and interruptions. Random moments surprise and disappear. Events come and go, snippets of both familiar and vaguely understood movements pass, hurtle onward, collide. We look around, engage and get carried away with questions about what might happen.
An innovator and leader in the Milwaukee arts community, Debra Loewen is known for her site-specific work and collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and theatrical groups. Early in her career, Loewen performed improvised concerts with Roulette founder Jim Staley both on tour in the Midwest, and at the Roulette loft in the 1980s. As an independent artist, she studied with modern dance pioneer Robert Ellis Dunn and explored technology and site-based performances in her early work, performing in Philadelphia, Chicago, San Diego, Toronto, Peru and Colombia. In 1986, the Wisconsin native returned to Milwaukee and founded Wild Space Dance Company, which has performed throughout Wisconsin and toured to Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Japan and Korea. A striking perspective on movement in space, Wild Space’s critically acclaimed site-based events have transformed Milwaukee landmarks, such empty swimming pools, parking garages, newly created urban parks, pedestrian bridges, historic buildings, and the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava-designed Windhover Hall, into “…imagination-stirring, site-specific modern dance performances…” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Over the past three decades, Loewen has earned multiple choreographic fellowships from Milwaukee County, the Wisconsin Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds a BFA in dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in dance from UW-Milwaukee.
Comprised of saxophonists Nick Zoulek (USA) and Tommy Davis (Canada), Duo d’Entre Deux has performed across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and France. Duo d’Entre Deux investigates complex, spectral, cross-over, and programmatic compositions, as well as collaborations with visual and improvisational artists. Their work has fostered outstanding relationships with celebrated composers including Christian Lauba and Mikel Kuehn, and has led to commissions and premieres of works by Robert Lemay and Etienne Rolin. This is Zoulek’s second performance with Wild Space, following their 2012 site-specific collaboration in a parking garage at the former Pabst Brewery.
Our ongoing [DANCEROULETTE] series reflects the commitment to presenting experimental dance that we’ve held since our founding in 1978, particularly the collaborative efforts of composers and choreographers exploring the relationship between sound and movement, choreography and composition. Roulette’s move to Brooklyn in September 2011 has enabled us to initiate a regular season of [DANCEROULETTE] presentations, which now hosts nearly 40 performances yearly.
[DANCEROULETTE] is supported, in part, by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.
