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Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance

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Events Next Week with Jennifer Monson and others

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Hello iLAND community,
     The next week is full of some exciting events. Please check out theMovement Research Spring Festival. I’ll be hosting a sensory walk in Central Park and performing in stillness-action-sweat-effort on Wednesday night. I will also be presenting at the Earth Matters on Stage conferencein Pittsburgh with iLAND board member, Julia Handschuh. Also, check out the AMAZING Post Plastica, a NEW and outstanding creation by Alina and Ela Troyano. I will be speaking about the BIRD BRAIN Osprey Migration tour at the pre-show talk, along with a beekeeper! I’m so excited!
     I also want to encourage all of you fearless people to sign up for Pooh Kaye’s Wild Fields’ workshop at Movement Research’s Summer MELT. This was one of the first pieces I made with Pooh Kaye. It is an amazing work and Pooh is incomparable artist. This is a rare and wonderful opportunity.
      We will be sending an update about the 2012 iLAB Residents soon!  The initial news from the collaborative teams is titillating.
     ENJOY the summer and I hope to see everyone multiple times in the gorgeous NYC environs.
Love,
Jennifer Monson
Founder and Artistic Director of iLAND
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Movement Research Spring Festival

Performance Event:   

stillness-action-sweat-effort

Wednesday May 30, 2012 | 10PM  | $5

The Center at West Park, NYC 

165 W. 86th Street
(West Park Presbyterian Church, corner of Amsterdam Avenue)

A performance experiment where the duet is charged with the exploration of stillness, action, sweat and effort. Participants were chosen based on their choreographic approaches and aesthetic differences that touch these categories. Performances can be rehearsed, improvised, score-driven or otherwise. The collaboration can be collective, competitive, a battle, a fusion, or indeterminate.

PARTICIPANTS: 

Aretha Aoki
devynn emory
Niall Jones
Jennifer Monson 

Central Park Sensory Walk

Led by Jennifer Monson

Saturday June 2, 2012 | 11am | FREE

CENTRAL PARK
Meet at the entrance on West 81 Street & Central Park West.

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Earth Matters On Stage

PANEL:  “Performance & Pause: Developing Kinesthetic Exchanges with Urban Environments”  

with Julia Handschuh, Jennifer Monson, Courtney Ryan, Arden Thomas
Thursday May 31, 2012 | 3:00-4:30 pm
Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, Pittsburgh, PA
A panel of papers aimed at facilitating an eco-conversation between artists and scholars on the subject of human engagement with the urban environment.  Topics discussed will include the work of iLAND and performer Julia Handschuh’s work in collaboration with iLand, and the work of artists Mark Bamuthi Joseph and Vlatka Horvat.
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PS122 and El Museo del Barrio present 

Post Plastica 

by Carmelita Tropicana & Ela Troyano
Featuring Carmelita Tropicana, Becca Blackwell & Erin Markey
May 31 – June 3, 2012
El Museo del Barrio (5th Ave at 104th St)
 
Part live performance, part video installation, this piece offers a glimpse into a future in which celebrity culture has pitched
a battle between the primacy of virtual and artistic lives; in which revolutionaries keep bees in a secret underground;
and in which a half-woman, half-bear scientist has gained the upper hand…

Pre-show talk at 6 pm on June 2, 2012
BIRD BRAIN with Jennifer Monson, choreographer and artistic director of interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance (iLAND)

and Urban Beekeeping with Guillermo Fernandez, of NYC Beekeeping

2 for 1 tickets in advance with discount code FF241.

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Movement Research 

MELT

July 9 – August 10, 2012
MELT Intensives are a series of daily workshops in technique, somatics, improvisation, composition and other areas offered each summer (5 weeks) and winter (3 weeks). Taught by Movement Research’s internationally recognized faculty as well as acclaimed guest artists, these workshops provide students with the unique opportunity to engage with some of the most highly regarded and innovative artists in the field of dance today.
Pooh Kaye

July 9 – July 13
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
3:30 pm-6:00 pm $130
Danspace Project
Wild Fields: Radical Strategies for Movement and Composition

Our Occupations (after the Occupations): with Kathy Westwater

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Re-Blogged from Wild Horses on Fire

Something I am wondering about kind of broadly is how your practices might have changed since the beginning of the occupations, if we can mark this beginning in the fall of 2011 (the occupations obviously having their immediate precedent in the Middle East and Europe).

Do you think it may be possible to speak to this a bit? […] Succinctly, in a paragraph or two? Maybe it has had no perceivable effect, which is fine of course, and in which case you might talk about why it is important to maintain what you are doing parallel to (or beyond?) current social movements and political events.

Image
Manhattan skyline behind PARK performers on North Mound at Fresh Kills (credit Marina Zamalin)

ITINERENT PARK NOTES
By Choreographer Kathy Westwater

When Occupy Wall Street began last year I was deeply entrenched in a creative residency on Staten Island at the Fresh Kills landfill, site and subject of PARK—an interdisciplinary performance project with collaborators Jennifer Scappettone and Seung Jae Lee—as it undergoes a 30-year transformation into a park.

Work on PARK began in 2008 during a residency in California around the time that the first tent cities started cropping up in municipal parks there, and my research immediately began to encompass non-recreational residential behavior in parks.

I was in fact deeply obsessed with the collapsing economy, having spent 2010 doing extensive research to understand the derivatives market, including how we managed collectively to have not known about something so massively detrimental to us all. That research got channeled into the performance/lecture “Deriva-trivia”.

Throughout my time working at Fresh Kills in fall 2011, Wall Street felt very present, like a part of or extension of the landfill. The financialization of the processes of making and doing that feed our global culture of consuming and enable the materialization of monuments to waste, Fresh Kills being the archetype, link the two sites, as well as the fact that one can see downtown Manhattan from Fresh Kills. Unsurprisingly yet still worth noting, one cannot see Fresh Kills from Wall Street.

Work on PARK since April 1 this year has occurred while in residence in a former vault in the basement of 14 Wall Street, a building right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange and around the corner from Zuccotti Park. This former vault has been “occupied” by artists for about five years via the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency Program.  Read more…

Bronx River Flotilla – May 5 – iLAB Residents in Action

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On Saturday May 5th, 2012 iLAB Residents Follow the Water Walks will take part in the annual Bronx River Flotilla.

The Bronx River Alliance will host over 200 participants as they traverse the Bronx River – beginning at Shoelace Park and ending at Concrete Plant Park. Registration is full. There will be a picnic from 12:30-4 pm at Concrete Plant Park. Welcome paddlers as they reach the finish line. Bring a blanket and picnic lunch.

Join us for our first public paddling event of the season. You and over 200 participants will paddle and glide along almost six miles of the Bronx River, from 219th Street to Concrete Plant Park. Enjoy unique views of the neighborhoods through which the river flows on its way to the sea.

Click here for more information.

iLAND announces the 2012 iLAB Residents

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iLAB, is a residency program supporting collaborations between movement-based artists and scientists, environmentalists, urban designers/landscape architects, architects and others that integrate creative practice within different fields/disciplines.  iLAND is pleased to announce this year’s iLAB residents:

Higher ED: Ecology + Dance

Liz Barry, director of urban environment for The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science
Jessica Einhorn, dancer, urban environmentalist
Lailye Weidman, dancemaker

Higher ED: Ecology + Dance will explore the physical relationship between the wind moving through urban environments and our bodies using the connective media of kite / balloon aerial mapping devices and weather observation movement scores during outdoor research activities.  

Follow the Water Walks

Paloma McGregor, choreographer, co-founder of Angela’s Pulse collaborative performance ensemble
Damian Griffin, Education Director, Bronx River Alliance
Rebecca Boger, Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Brooklyn College, with dual appointment at CUNY Graduate Center

Follow the Water Walks plans to use our choreographic, scientific and cultural research to develop interactive movement structures for a culminating model that will offer an embodied experience of the storm water routes and the Bronx River, with attention to what was, is and will be part of that living landscape. 

More information about the 2012 residents is here.

More information about iLAB is here.

2012 iLAND Symposium Transition

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Symposium Blog Basket
Thank you to everyone who attended the  2012 iLAND Symposium,
Moving Into the Out There:  Indeterminacy & Improvisation in Performance & Environmental Practice.
Gretchen Till, who was blogging throughout the Symposium, has created this Blog Basket, where you’ll find documents from and responses to the Symposium.
The questions that are up for comment and conversation:
  • An Indeterminate Partnering:
  • What does collaboration mean now?
  • An Index of ?:?:?: What are your constellations?
  • What do you want to return to?
  • A Shape (s) We Were In – What was your form?
  • A Thought Body – What did you read?

The resources that are up for comment and conversation: 

  • the Performances
  • the Panels
  • the Thrown Outside Workshops
  • the iLANDING Method

Visit the Blog Basket Now and Join us in the conversation!

The 2012 iLAND Symposium Begins!

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We’re off to a great start with the 2012 iLAND Symposium: Moving into the Out There.  These annual symposiums give us a taste of the interdisciplinary research community that iLAND is creating.

As is often the case with iLAND, many conversations are started that open onto much bigger discussions that we do not have time to continue in the confines of the Symposium.   Stay tuned for blog posts by Gretchen Till, who will be blogging throughout this year’s Symposium; we hope you will join the conversation in person and online.

See you tomorrow, inside the New School and Thrown Outside for transects and weather balloons!