by Jeff Grygny

You’re walking down a torchlit path with people you don’t know. The night clouds glow with reflected urban light. You notice odd sounds coming from the darkness to your left: shadowy figures, neither human nor animal, are tracking your course, their bulky shapes bristling with long, fan-like spikes. Where the paths cross, a man in red is praying–or is he having a seizure? He mutters, twisting and bending with jerking movements. You start to lose track of what real: that rhythmic sound in the tree—is it a cicada? Or a hidden speaker? That sound—is it the wind rustling the leaves? Or is it part of the ethereal sonic atmospheres created by a woman sitting on the ground by the side of the path, moving her hands over some instrument? A woman in blue emerges into the light; the man and his red-clad cohorts step back; they sway as she dances alone, sadly and slowly. At last the man and the woman both leave, going down different paths.

Is this a dream? A hallucination? It can be hard to tell sometimes during Field Guide, the latest in Wild Space Dance Company’s In Site series of works created for specific places, in this case, Havenwoods State Forest, the only state forest within the City of Milwaukee. This enchanting immersive performance takes the audience from place to ingeniously-lit place within the park, and under the steady direction of Artistic Director Dan Schuchart, it’s a tour-de-force of creative, technical, and logistic imagination: the most daring and original adventure in the performing arts our city has seen in years. And like all good art, it stirs up many thoughts. feelings and senses, which will not necessarily be the same for any two people.

This magical work is produced in collaboration with Ometochtli Mexican Folk Dance company and musicians from the Out There performance group, which organizes outdoor avant garde concerts. It’s an impressive bringing together of different cultural traditions and artistic vocabularies that somehow, magically, creates something exceptionally moving and powerful.  Throughout it all. the night time woods and prairie provide not only a fantastic setting for the dances, but are also full of numinous presences that are palpable, if not always visible, characters in their own right.

The evening opens with a grand demonstration of this alchemy: the Wild-Space dancers enter a wide open field, running, interacting, mirroring and varying each other’s movements. They approach the audience and speak about things they have encountered on the land, not by naming them, but with poetry that melts into movement. Then, women of Ometochtli enter in traditional garb, carrying ribbons of different colors which they skillfully weave into kaleidoscopic patterns, which is apparently an art that goes back to pre-colonial times. The two groups move among and around each other, weaving the modern and the traditional in ways that express their humanity while holding the integrity of their own cultural languages. It’s beautiful  to see—and incredibly moving.

The audience divides into two groups, each following a guide with a luminous baton along winding trails and into different prepared performance spaces. I don’t know if both groups see all of the performances: our group could hear the drumming and cries of Ometochtli as we moved between sites. But we did witness other visions: dancers suspended from an ancient tree by ropes, launching themselves airborne and dancing on the tree’s trunk as if it were the ground; and then a palate-cleansing interlude involving sand and changing spatial and emotional relationships, to live violin accompaniment. On our way to the final act we were met with the sweet fragrance of burning copal wood, and the forceful drumming and conch-trumpets of a procession by the dancers of Ometochtli, coming to meet us in full regalia of spangles, feathers, and ankle-bells. It was an unforgettable dramatic moment in an evening of surprises—and surprise, after all, is one of the indispensable qualities of great art.

The conclusion was a traditional Aztec ceremony blessing the six directions: East, South, West, North, Above, and Below. To say that in no way captures the visceral impact of the ritual. As a modern observer, one might experience a web of complicated feelings: a sense of touristic consumerism, perhaps, as we raise our cameraphones to record the spectacle; a sense of enormous gratitude to the dancers of Ometochtli for sharing their precious cultural heritage; an uncanny disconnect between modern dance, with its deep orientation to individual experience, and the traditional dance, which honors community and continuity; a sense of wonder at the harmonious interplay of the two; sorrow, anger, and fear for the people who are even today being ripped from their homes and families by a cruel administrative machine; and a sense of awe, as the customs of a distant land bless and empower the land beneath our very feet, land that has been inhabited by a different indigenous people, then colonized, farmed, turned into a prison, then a base for fearsome weapons, and now restored to a semblance of the natural world.

We modern people, by default, see nature as scenery, a pretty luxury getaway, or even as an inconvenience. For every other culture in the human story, the natural world is a society of beings, on whom we depend for our very lives. The traditional view is closer to the truth, of course: the founding ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote  that we should not see the land as something that we own, but rather as a community that we are part of. It may be that our future depends on becoming more like indigenous people—not by imitating their lifeways, but by exploring cultural practices that transform the impersonal, exploitive relationship with the living world that we inherited from the materialist culture we grew up in.Wild Space gives us a brilliant picture of how this can happen.

Ecological scholar Roy Scranton has written that “ …the narratives and meanings we associate with the natural world are never simply given nor inherent, waiting to be revealed . . . [They] are cultural, taught, passed down from one generation to the next, revised to accommodate new evidence, molded to serve political needs, and warped by social currents and mass emotions, all the while evolving through their own poorly understood dynamics and trajectories.” Which is to say, our relationship with the living world is permeable to needs and influences, even deliberate intervention, using the instruments of cultural transmission, like education, advocacy— and the arts!

As events beyond out power thrust us into an uncertain future, socially, technologically, and ecologically, creative, cultural exchanges and cross-pollination like this Wild Space performance are priceless models for how to per-form a new culture for our children and their children’s children. In this way, Field Guide is a luminous signal, guiding us through our modern wilderness towards a more harmonious way of human life on Earth.

Wild Space

in collaboration with Ometochtli Mexican Folk Dance

presents

InSite: Field Guide

October 10 and 11, 2025

Choreography by:

Katelyn Altmann, Cuauhtli Ramírez Castro, Ash Ernesto, Zoe Mei Glise, Alejandra Jiménez, Elisabeth Roskopf, Dan Schuchart, and in collaboration with the dancers

Music Direction and Live Performance by:

Lorna Dune, John Larkin, Allen Russell, Antonio Velázquez

Lighting Design & Stage Manager:

Colin Gawronski

Technical Director:

Tony Lyons

Tech Crew & Docents:

Maria Shanklin, Rae Zimmerli

PERFORMERS:

Ometochtli: Favi Álvarez, Leah Colchado, Ash Ernesto, Angelica Escamilla, Norma Gonzalez, Alejandra Jiménez, Mariela Jiménez, Laura Medina, Jaquelin Moreno, María Pérez, Yarely Ramírez, Alejandra Rodríguez Ortega, Antonio Velázquez

Wild Space: Katelyn Altmann, Emma Becker, Audrey Dudek, Angela Frederick, Cuauhtli Ramírez Castro, Ashley Ray Garcia, Zoe Mei Glise, Jessica Lueck, Jenni Reinke, Elisabeth Roskopf, Nicole Spence, Jasmine Uras

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