LeGendre and Foster’s Wonderland at UWM

Friday night, Carey Foster, Amii LeGendre and friends transformed just about every space except the actual theater in a UWM arts building into a theatrical wonderland.

Foster and LeGendre, who met as students in the MFA program in dance at UWM, collaborated with 10 other performers in The Museum of Narrow Places. Naturally, it begins in a wide space, the Inova Arts Center Gallery on the second floor. Neat groupings of furniture, suggesting little islands of home and office, break up the space. The artists urge us to sit anywhere. Right then, we know Narrow Places will not be fixed and presentational. It will depend on where we sit or stand and whether or not the artists choose to get in your particular face.

Foster, LeGendre and Anne Bloom, accompanied by driving pop from the Black Eyed Peas and then Flo Rida, launch into a full-bodied, athletic dance. Their limbs fly in close proximity to the spectators. The dance at first seems to be an exhilarating improvisation. Little by little, we see related material and then occasional unisons popping up among the dancers, who for the most part remain distant from one another. As they near each other, they fall in together more and more.

When they start shouting, the tone changes. The music ends, and Foster and LeGendre launch into a silly, giddy, girly dialogue about the delights of living with much older boyfriends. It’s very funny. The tone suddenly changes, as the two confront each other with barbs about personal failures. Bloom and LeGendre engage in contact improvisation remarkable for the running and flinging of bodies one into the other and for the soft and graceful disarming of impact. They rest as Foster offers a lovely solo featuring the serpentine expression of her long, slender arms.

That’s part one, 25 minutes. Part two sends us on intimate adventures throughout the building, where 12 soloists await. Passports with directions hang on a wall. Chaos did not ensue; Foster and LeGendre thought this through.

We were to take one of the 12 passports, advance in a small, self-selected group to a specified locations and observe an event. When it ends, we return to the main gallery and exchange passports with someone else. Foster encouraged sharing of experiences. This smart plan assured circulation and promoted a wonderful sociability. At 9:20 p.m., we were all to gather for a finale — and snacks — in the main gallery.

We certainly had plenty to discuss.

I wound down two flights of stairs into the basement. The passport instructed me to knock three times on the door of the men’s locker room, wait 10 seconds, and enter. A battery of African drums stood in bright light in the tiled shower area beyond the dim locker room, from which I and three others observed. Willis never turned to us. He walked around the drums and told the true-life tale of his daily caring for his invalid, mentally failing, 105-year-old mother. He spoke of it as a blessing, and spoke touchingly of the emptiness he feels in the quiet house when she leaves. The speech flowed naturally into some sweet drumming. Willis concluded by singing Billie Holiday’s Don’t Explain, a classic song changed entirely by the context.

Just two of us witnessed, from very close up in a tiny basement dressing room, Angie Yetzke’s intensely personal, weirdly surreal confessional to Coke addiction combined with a live Coca-Cola commercial and taste test. It’s social commentary, melancholy expression of personal weakness, and bizarre joke all at once.

Christal Wagner lurked in the freight elevator, in the narrow band between half-closed upper and lower doors that open and close like a mouth. Wagner, crazy sexy in a little wrap dress, rapped her high heels percussively on the steel floor. She lounged luxuriously on the narrow edge of the lower door and somehow balanced to ride it up and down. Out on the floor of in front of the elevator, Wagner established motifs of finger-gun gestures and slow-drag moves. She occasionally whistled or hummed a tune I couldn’t quite place. Then she belted it out: My Baby Shot Me Down. Can the dancer sing? Oh yes.

Wagner gathered up the cut-out discount coupons scattered about the floor, held them overhead and then acted as if she were taking the most sensuous shower as they cascaded over her body. Wagner is the sort of fully committed, explosive, articulate mover who can overwhelm from a big stage. In close quarters, she is dynamite.

We descended to the basement once more, knocked three times, waited 10 seconds, and entered a small room of rough concrete. Liz Zastrow held herself in a sitting position, back against the wall, under a harsh worklight directly overhead. She wore a grimy white tank and cargo pants and running shoes. Hair a mess; no makeup. At first glance you know she’s a prisoner. Her presence was intense. Her dancing, comprising among other things a desperate flinging of her body into the hard wall, was intense. Her speech, partly hallucinatory memoir and partly lucid argument about political imprisonment, was intense. So was the accompaniment — Wagner’s coincidental stomping, carried down two floors via the nearby elevator shaft.

I experienced four of 12 possible events at The Museum of Narrow Places. You might have a very different evening if you attend the second and final performance, at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 9. But I have a hunch you’ll have a pretty amazing evening, too. Admission is pay-what-you-will, at the door only.