 Hollywood sunk millions into the old Second Ward Bank Building (now known as the Milwaukee County Historical Society) to make it a suitable backdrop for Johny Depp’s John Dillinger. But it took imagination of the non-Hollywood kind to bring that building to life. In Wild Space Dance Company’s Past Present, Deborah Loewen and her dancers perform a kind of ritual transformation upon this classic 1913 Beaux Arts building, unleashing the history locked in its filigreed walls.
And its vaults. In the bank’s gorgeous and massive bank vaults, Loewen finds the perfect metaphor. The first floor’s main vault, which serves as a backdrop to most of the dances, is a façade of contrasts: the door’s glittering surfaces – gilded and gleaming as if it were imported from a Versailles ballroom – set beside the shadowy recess of the vault itself. And centered above, a clock that ticks along with the performance.
This dance is about history, after all. And time. For all Loewen’s brilliant and beautiful work over the last two decades, her engagement with the past brings out her richest and most poignant images. Here, she reaches back into the past – the vault, the signature omnipresent overcoats found in vintage photographs, the building itself – and uses it to build a sweet meditation on transience, mortality, and the nature of memory.
It begins with an invocation of sorts, dancers line the balcony as the audience looks up, and Jan Kellogg’s lovely lighting sets shadows dancing on the buildings pillars. From there, to the charged space before the vault, where vignettes (drawn from the 1998 City Stories) evoke stories form the past. A couple (Tony Horne and Shirley Gilbert) meets in a train station, and their entire life together seems contained in a slow, jazzy pas de deux – right up to the last image, where Gilbert’s hand trails languidly down Horne’s back, a suggestion of their final separation.
Yeng Vang-Strath and Allison Kaminsky step in and out of the past, insinuating themselves into historical cityscape photograph projections. “Trench Coats” is a pickpocket pas de troix that’s part Jacques Tati and part Three Stooges. Then, Loewen and her dancers explore the other parts of the building, and the ghosts really come out. A shop girl (Jade Jablonski) shuffles behind a caged vault, suggesting the uneasy confluence of pin-up girl and Girl Friday. Dan Schuchart explores the industrial geometry of another vault, his legs buckling like a rag dolls as he swoops between the mechanicals. And in a truly magical moment, we watch dancers frolic in the snow through windows that act as time tunnels.
In the end, the dancers take over the main floor, creating music from the ping of coins on the marble counters and floors. And in the magical final scene (set, as is most of the evening, to Josh Schmidt’s sound montages), we see the spell broken and time advance. Lives become graves, then a tapestry of stars, and finally a scattering of crumpled overcoats. Past becomes present. But spirit remains.
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