Mission Statement
Wild Space Dance Company, established in 1986 by Founding Director Debra Loewen, is dedicated to expanding the audience for contemporary dance through performance and educational programs in the greater Milwaukee area and southeastern Wisconsin. Our mission is to explore diverse cultural landscapes to create provocative new choreography, site-based performances, and educational opportunities. The company cultivates creative experimentation, innovation, and collaboration by investing in local artists, and engages audiences with dance in a shared experience of place and community.
Our mission is achieved by creating and producing new, original work each season that engages a diverse audience, and implementing outreach programs that reach underserved students in the Milwaukee area, enhancing their self-confidence, self-discipline, and creative thinking.
Known for our site-specific works and artistic collaborations, we have produced over 140 original dance works, performed to critical acclaim throughout Wisconsin and beyond. These works are inspired by the lives and voices of Milwaukee, celebrating the city’s built and natural landscape.
Our interdisciplinary outreach programs expand students’ understanding of dance, visual art, music, and physical fitness. As a company-in-residence at Lincoln Center Middle School of the Arts, we have worked with more than 70 schools and community centers, offering school-day, after-school, and summer programs.
Artist Statement
Our artistic research is deeply rooted in process and collaboration, bringing together visual acuity and compelling interpersonal exchange. The body is simultaneously form and content. It is the push and pull between formalism and conceptualism of the moving, thinking body that drives our dance practice. From a visual approach we are interested in the aesthetic, lines in space, distance, perspective, shape, visual rhythm. But moving bodies also hold meaning, stories, and history that unfold in relationship and time. The moving body is a place where multiple drives, ideas, and interactions can move in accord or clash against one another. Dance continually intrigues us because it is the intersection between these possibilities.
