by Jeff Grygny
What does it mean to be alive? Something? Anything? If it means something, is it anything that we could say? In what language could we say it?
Wild Space Dance Company’s latest program, the epic Beyond the Shimmer offers strong evidence that it’s dance. The hour-long performance is a sprawling symphony of themes and variations in movement, with sparkling technical effects and enigmatic text projected on a giant screen. Ten dancers ebb and flow in a true ensemble, like particles in a cloud chamber, microbes on a slide, or galaxies and nebulas in the vastness of space/time: individuals weaving between the subjectivity and intersubjectivity of bodies. It’s a big dance, in scale and conception. As often with dance, there’s no story, characters, or conflicts to explain: it is what it is. Watching it is like staring at a Jackson Pollock painting until the splashes and squiggles seem to move, spelling wordless messages.
The dance is choreographer and Wild Space Artistic Director Dan Schuchart’s reworking of a piece he made with UWM dance students several years back; one of the dancers in the show had even seen the dance performed by her younger siblings.
The dancers’ concentration is unwavering; their movements are precise, detailed, and fluid. The projected text by student Ambrose Shulte, now augmented by Brian Rott of Quasimondo Physical Theatre, varies from the very specific—memories of eating an orange; the history of the MIR space station—to clusters of open-ended third-person plural action words. The overall impression is of a universe of energetic verbs; individuals grouping and un-grouping, feeling separation, then merging like drops of mercury into shimmering communities, only to divide and splash outwards again, over and over. And while the idea of “space” comes up frequently, it’s not just the cold impersonal space of physics, but also the warm dynamic space of embodied “us-ness.”
The color scheme is entirely grayscale: Kalyn Diercks’ costumes in shades of pearl, aluminum, smoke, and mist; black and white text; white light, mirror balls, and crinkly sheets of metallic mylar. The show treats technology as a toy and an art medium: matter animated by the human ludic impulse. The dancers play flashlights over the mirror balls, creating moire patterns in hypnotic shoals of moving dots. They drag the shiny material across the black floor, making silvery nests for supine figures, only to blow them away with a powerful industrial fan. In a spectacular finale, they release the sparkling film over the fan to fly 20 feet into the air, twisting like tornadoes or flapping like uncanny nebulas.
The evening began with a stunning solo by Schuchart entitled “Dan’s Wild Space” It was choreographed by guest artist Alexandria Barbier as the latest episode of the “few things ahead of time” series, in which a dancer and a choreographer create a composition in 48 hours, releasing inhibitions and liberates intuition to generate a sense of freshness and risk-taking that can leave you breathless.
It goes like this: Schuchart enters from behind the black curtains of the cleanly modern Jan Serr Studio. He measures himself against the two-story windows that spectacularly reveal the Milwaukee skyline. After a witty visual joke, and a brief exploration of the space, he walks downstage and asks “Am I standing too close?” The next sequence hews to ordinary movements, punctuated with brief spoken phrases that, free of context, are gnomic. They hint at a relationship that might become intimate? He sits on the floor facing the windows, The warm romantic tones of Sébastiene Tellier’s “La Ritournelle” begin to play and, like magic, the view of the city comes alive, lights in apartment windows, boats in the harbor, the flow of cars—and suddenly the city is an enchanted place, full of untold possibilities. Schuchart breaks into an uninhibited, heart-open dance; he lets his long hair down to fly freely, and as the vocals come up, he lip-syncs, smiling with pure joy:
Oh, nothing’s going to change my love for you
I wanna spend my life with you
So we make love on the grass under the moon
No one can tell, damned if I do
Forever journey on golden avenues
I drift in your eyes since I love you
I got that beat in my veins for only rule
Love is to share, mine is for you
The music fades; he ties up his hair and takes a well-deserved bow. It’s a delicious confluence of artists and space.
The meaning of dance is a right-brain thing; it’s almost impossible to articulate clearly, so dance is not a high priority for our militantly left-brain society. Beyond the Shimmer might be about the wonder and poignancy of consciousness as it emerges from space, coalescing in the play of vital, sentient flesh. Maybe that’s what all dance is about.
If any art form could claim the most immediate access to the meaning of life, it might be dance. And if any dance could communicate the sheer wonder of being alive, it might be Beyond the Shimmer.
Wild Space Dance Company presents
Beyond the Shimmer
April 10-11, 2026
https://www.wildspacedance.org/shimmerprogram
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