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Dance and Ecology: A Symposium for Climate Action
Presentations by the Dance Research Fellows on their projects focused on dance and ecology
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New York Public Library for the Performing Arts -Bruno Walter Auditorium Enter via 111 Amsterdam Ave. between West 64th and 65th Street New York, NY 10023-7498
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About this event
This event will take place in person at the Library for the Performing Arts.
Each year, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division oversees the Dance Research Fellowship, an annual cohort of dance scholars and artists invited to research a specific aspect of dance. This year, fellows focused their research on the theme of dance and ecology.
Fellows Juli Brandano, Rosemary Candelario, María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez, Lindsey Jones, Richard Move, and Rachna Nivas will deliver presentations in our annual symposium, culminating the work undertaken during a six-month fellowship cycle.
Can't make it in person? Sign up for the virtual event of this event on February 3
10 AM - Dr. Rosemary Candelario, Tracing Anna Halprin’s Influences on American Butoh Ecologies
11 AM - Juli Brandano, Dance as/and Land Reclamation
12 PM - María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez, ijó ìrántí/ dance of memory/ dança da lembrança/ baile de la memoria
1 PM - Lunch break
2 PM - Rachna Nivas, Nature, Woman, and the Macrocosm: How Indian classical dance transmits a consciousness of indivisibility
3 PM - Lindsey Jones, One
4 PM - Dr. Richard Move, Herstory of the Universe
Funding for the Dance Research Fellowship and Symposium was generously provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Juli Brandano
"Dance as/and Land Reclamation"
Beginning with the concept of "Art as Land Reclamation," as considered and defined by land artists Robert Smithson and Robert Morris, this project aims to understand the possibility of dance to reclaim and rehabilitate ecologically damaged landscapes. Can our ephemeral, embodied form have a direct impact on a site? Inversely, what parts of landscape and the natural world can directly affect or influence the dancing body? In constructing the performative presentation of my research, Juli Brandano studied and "reclaimed" parts of the archives belonging to Morris, Smithson, and Simone Forti, among many others—alongside this historical research, she has created movement and written scores specifically looking at coastal erosion on Rockaway Beach.
Inspired by the 1970s Land Art movement, Brandano will explore the concept of “Dance as Land Reclamation,” as a way to think through how earthworks on ecologically devastated sites could rehabilitate the land. Brandano spends her fellowship researching archives of choreographers Anna Halprin, Elaine Summers, and others who made outdoor dances contemporaneously to the Land Artists in more community-based ways. Through this archival research Brandano will critically examine how dance can be used to “reclaim” land for indigenous populations, and create a new collection of site-specific improvisational scores providing a framework for how to “reclaim” land affected by coastline erosion and flooding, developed in part alongside local community members and dancers.
Juli Brandano is a dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn, NY.
María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez
ijó ìrántí / dance of memory / dança da lembrança / baile de la memoria
In the Brazilian tradition of Candomblé, orixás are spiritual intermediaries within nature that connect, depend upon, and energize humankind and the divine—and the dance of the orixás is at the heart of this circle of energy. María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez seeks to use this project to bring awareness to the dances and stories of the orixás and their influences on contemporary dance both in Brazil and the world at large. These oral histories are short stories regarding the life and power of the orishá as it relates to nature. Each orixá is a part of this nature/natureza: Oxunmarê is the rainbow; Ògún is the forest floor; Oyá is the wind; Iroko is time (represented by a tree with the same name); Oshún the river and its rocks filled with gems. These stories have been passed down from generation to generation through voice, drums, and dance.
In Candomblé people often refer to their humility and proximity to nature by saying they have “o pé no chão”—their feet on the dirt ground. This is important in regards to the dance because the human body must ascertain a connection with the natural energies of the Earth. When a person incorporates and embodies an orixá, they must dance and give axé (energy and will). Practitioners of these traditions, says Jiménez, are the most ecologically aware people she has met—they insist on limiting any form of pollution caused by their practices, and they often work with other members of their communities in political matters and protests to protect these natural parts of their cities. Everything is active, animated and alive, and must be preserved.
The purpose of this dance archive Jiménez has created is to educate a viewer so that we may all begin to see these practices as integral to the canon of art history and bring awareness to their relationships with nature. Through research in the library’s dance archives, interviews, dance classes, seminars, ceremonies, conversations, and personal investigation with my own performance practice, she has come to further understand the stories of the orishás as a radical positioning against materialism and towards harmony between body and Earth.
María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez is an interdisciplinary artist born in 1992 in Holguín, Cuba. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2015 and MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2020.
Lindsey Jones
One
As a dance artist and herbalist, Lindsey Jones lives a twofold experience of communication through the body and exploring the healing properties of plants. At the Dance Symposium, Jones will present two projects she worked on through the Dance Research Fellowship: Meridian dances and Plants of 1609, which incorporates the work and research of Deborah Hay and Pauline Oliveros along with her studies of traditional herbal medicine.
Deborah Hay often uses scores as compositions through the act of improvisation. Using these scores in the dance-making process holds space for imagination and memory to be expressed; it allows for an experience that is accessible to anybody.
Pauline Oliveros’ practice of “Deep Listening” suggests a path to healing ourselves and the Earth by deepening the relationship between our attention and our awareness. In doing so, we more fully awaken and experience interconnectedness. The intention behind Deep Listening is reflected in traditional herbalism, in which the herbalist observes patterns and conditions within body systems.
The act of recognizing patterns and studying relationships—in the evaluation of a body’s symptoms, in watching one’s own thoughts in sitting meditation, in observing patterns of changing weather—makes us able to fully experience the reality of our interdependence. This acceptance and honesty, Jones says, is what is needed to radically re-adjust the imbalances we have been creating in our own bodies and in our Earth.
Lindsey Jones is a Brooklyn-based dance artist and herbalist. She has performed with numerous choreographers and companies over the past decade including; Pam Tanowitz Dance, Dance Heginbotham, Merce Cunningham Trust, Kimberly Bartosik/daela, Caleb Teicher, Sally Silvers, Bill Young, among others. Jones has taught as adjunct faculty at SUNY Purchase and Marymount Manhattan and guest taught at Dartmouth University, Oklahoma University, Montclair University, Case Western University, The Yard at Martha’s Vineyard, The Taylor School and was part of the DanceMotion USA program in 2016. She is certified to teach Cunningham technique and Dance of Parkinson’s. Jones is currently in her third and final year of studying herbalism at ArborVitae School of Traditional Herbalism with Richard Mandelbaum, Claudia Keel and Samuel Perry. She is a proud citizen pruner of New York City.
Richard Move
Herstory of the Universe
Herstory of the Universe is an autoanalysis that merges with a historiography of select artists by situating their shared theme—humanity’s interdependence with nature—within new materialist perspectives. Herstory of the Universe is an evolving body of site-specific performance works by Richard Move that activate natural environments and call attention to ecological issues. The title, Herstory of the Universe, refers to the resilience of Mother Nature and the earth’s remarkable potential to recover and renew. Herstory commissions include creations for the Parrish Art Museum (2014), The Trust for Governors Island (2021), and the forthcoming Herstory of the Universe@Dartmouth in 2023.
The artists Move examines include dancer and choreographer, Molissa Fenley, in her 1989 solo, Floor Dances (Requiem for the Living), with a set design by land artist, Richard Long; dancer and choreographer, Maureen Fleming in her Axis Mundi, first performed in 1988; and several “earth-body” works by the visual and performance artist Ana Mendieta, from the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on authors such as Donna Haraway and Mel Y. Chen, Move positions the solo works made by these artists within new materialism while, in the words of Harraway, “making kin” with both these artists and these authors. Move’sobjective is to reveal, in the words of Chen, “a biopolitics that perpetually resituates, recombines, and rearticulates the matter of life - in the particularized bodies of its animals, objects, humans.”
Adding to a 20-year span of creating site-specific dance performances that activate natural environments while calling attention to ecological issues, Move has been developing Herstory of the Universe. With their fellowship, Move will research the thawing permafrost to add to their body of work, and placing research of like-minded choreographic artists alongside new scientific studies through an essay, accessible dance film, and workshop.
Move, Ph.D., M.F.A., is a TED Global Oxford Fellow, Artistic Director of MoveOpolis! and Assistant Arts Professor of Dance at New York University. Move's choreographic commissions include productions for Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project, two works for the Martha Graham Dance Company and a solo for New York City Ballet Principal, Heléne Alexopoulos.
Rachna Nivas
Nature, Woman, and the Macrocosm: How Indian classical dance transmits a consciousness of indivisibility
At the core of modern Western culture is an ideology of isolating human life from its environment, disconnecting the affinity between all living beings, and disassociating the human body from the macro cycle of life, i.e. repressing the power that feminine energy holds in nature and all of existence. This ideology is entrenched in greed, materialism, power, and fear of women, which has led to patriarchy, destruction of our environment, and a decline in our collective and individual spiritual harmony.
The classical dances of South Asia are a 2,000-year evolving continuum of humans embodying the feelings and spirit of life. These dance forms personify the spiritual archetypes, cultural beliefs, philosophical inquiry, and anthropological roots of the people and civilization of the Indian subcontinent. Its sacred lore and mythos reflect a kinship and relatedness between the cosmos and the whole of Earthly creation, leading to great reverence and benevolence towards the elements, animals, and plants. It is this oneness between all entities, this “ecological humility” that begets a fundamental consciousness of collective thinking and protection. And while a male supremacist framework eventually took hold of Indian society and its myths, worship of eternal femininity through the form of divine goddesses’ synergistic relationship with nature and all that is animate and sensuous in the world, lies at the very genesis of Indian civilization.
Rachna Nivas’s project uses the Jerome Robbins Dance Division archives to challenge, expand, and refocus themes and mythos performed in Indian classical dance as relevant and engaging consciousness-raising of our interconnectedness with nature, woman, and the macrocosm. Further, it elevates ancient Eastern philosophies for how dance can be consumed, perceived, and approached as a platform for social change.
After studying South Asian Studies and Molecular Environmental Biology, Nivas made a pivot to become a full-time dancer and educator. Nivas brings both of these fields of study together with a project that draws from the exclusive collections of Indian classical dance at the Dance Division, illuminating masters of Indian dance such as Balasaraswati, Rukmini Devi, and Uday Shankay, among others. Nivas will elevate the Eastern philosophies of how dance is consumed, perceived, and approached as a platform for social change.
Rachna Nivas is an artist, choreographer, activist, and educator in Indian classical dance, bringing a relevant voice to kathak. Called “...an expert in all sides of her art” by the New York Times, deemed “charismatic” and “revelatory” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and featured in Dance Magazine, Nivas is a fierce and passionate performer.
Rosemary Candelario
Tracing Anna Halprin’s Influences on American Butoh Ecologies
Anna Halprin is well known as a major figure in ecological dance in the United States, whose work on city streets, her mountain home dance deck, and at Sea Ranch laid the groundwork for dancing with nature for countless choreographers and practitioners. What is less known is the inspiration Halprin has had on US-based butoh and butoh-related practitioners who have significant ecologically-focused practices, including Eiko & Koma, Body Weather Laboratory, inkBoat, and Nature Moves. These and many more butoh-related artists studied with Halprin and even collaborated with her, but their connections have not been noted or studied beyond specific performances.
The presentation by Rosemary Candelario highlights parallels identified while she researched Halprin’s archives that may have played a role in attracting Halprin and these dancers to one another: an avant-garde rebellion against modern dance; a commitment to staging taboo topics such as illness, aging, and death; and a curiosity about the body’s internal environment, as well as its relationship to its external environment. In addition to discussing these affinities, Candelario also discusses how intriguing appearances of particular dancers in the archives (often in a photograph or as a name in a program) led her beyond the archives to seek out dancers’ stories of working with Halprin.
Rosemary Candelario writes about and makes dances engaged with Asian and Asian American dance, butoh, ecology, and site-related performance. She is the recipient of the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016). Candelario is also the co-editor with Bruce Baird of The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018).
Image: Eiko & Koma in Land with musical score by Roger Mirabel performed by members of the Taos Pueblo tribe. Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1991. Photograph by Blanche Mackey/Martha Swope Associates/BAM.