Event

Dancing In A Hard Place

Dancing in a Hard Place is a full length interior site dance set in The Muñoz Waxman Gallery at Santa Fes Center for Contemporary Arts, with performances at 7:30pm on July 8th, 9th and 10th, 2016. Among the sculptural works of artists Ellen Babcock and Cannupa Hanska, audience will follow dance action as it emerges along a fluid path, through settings inside the exhibition space both intimate and broad.

Conceived and directed by GROUND SERIES collective members Micaela Gardner and Sarah Ashkin, the process concept for the creation of Dancing in a Hard Place relied on the interpretive minds and sensibilities of its ensemble members, Sophia Rog, Spencer Toll, Adam McKinney, Ehren Kee Natay, Paolo Speirn, and Brittany Delany, to engage in a group dream and reflection on the the living earth around us.

The content and research fueling this work is culled from an accumulated reading list by environmental writers including Annalee Newitz, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, David Abram, Wendell Berry, Jacques Lusseyran, William Stolzenburg, Elizabeth Kolbert, Alan Weisman, William Cronon, Gary Snyder, and John Hildebidle. The writings range from Paris Climate Summit reports, to bird poems. From koans of wholeness, to manifestos of a destroyed wilderness. Based on close reading and discussion, the cast first generated choreographic responses in small focus groups. After showing one another initial findings, themes in common emerged and choreographic congruencies revealed themselves. Next an intensive building process ensued that aligned, braided, deconstructed and developed the individual and fledgling pieces into the final whole.

Dancing In a Hard Place is a procession of odes and poems to landscape; sensual and cerebral pictures of humans and animals on earth. Slicked with nostalgia, the piece longs for our wavering connection to a landscape, home, and self inside this actual and psychic interior of the hard place we live and dance within.