Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance
Kate Cahill is an architect, researcher, and long-time member of the board of directors of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance (iLAND) in New York City. She studies Urbanism, Landscape and Ecology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and serves as the lead research assistant for the Mumbai Portal of the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative. Before moving to Cambridge, Kate enjoyed collaborating on interdisciplinary teams and practicing architecture in New York and Beijing.
Recent past work includes research into infrastructures of mobility and control in the extraction enclave of the Atacama desert, Chile; the paradox of affordable housing shortage and neighborhood abandonment in Cancún, Mexico; and the interrelationships of housing, livelihoods and urban form in Mumbai, India. She is currently interested in the development of new, inclusive forms of collaborative practice; the pedagogy and agency of architecture + research; coastal resilience and adaptation planning; movement as a research practice and the ethics of fieldwork by design schools. Kate is co-founder of the GSD Design Research Forum and co-edits the student journal Process. She is a recent recipient of the AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Research Fellowship.
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Saturday July 26 9am-12pm and Sunday August 3 3pm-6pm at 59th Street and Pier 64-66
Kate and Maggie will explore collaboration and the methodology of practice developed from disciplines including architecture, choreography, sound and sculpture in relationship to urban ecology through a one-day workshop of movement, writing, construction and drawing.
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Embodied Mapping forged connections across scales of public and private. The residency connected communities by creating a mapping system that uncovered hidden synchronicities, intersections, and potentialities about the neighborhood that are not readily apparent or accessed at the street level. The collaborators’ process included charrettes, collecting, book making, and other ways of experimenting with mapping through the body. These practices derived from architecture, oral history, visual arts, performance, and dance.
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StrataSpore used mushrooms as both metaphor and material to discuss infrastructure, networks, and latent potential. The process cultivated “spores” of knowledge about local ecosystems and urban sustainability. The collaborators combined elements of task and performance-based art, experiential learning, cooking, mushroom hunting and identification, and experimental design practice.
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SIP (Sustained Immersive Process)/Watershed an investigation into the NYC Regional watershed viewed as a meta-choreography of the historical, geological, and cultural layers of the interaction of built and natural phenomena of water in the region.
Public events will be held October 1 – 3 and 7 – 10. There will be four, 40-minute events daily in the mornings and late afternoons. Performance locations include two sites on Governors Island, the Nature Walk at Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant, under the Manhattan Bridge, 164th Street at the Hudson River, and 59th Street at 12th Avenue. See detailed schedule below.
The audience for SIP/Watershed is limited to 8 people per event. Reservations are required. To reserve space, send an email to info@ilandart.org with a first and second choice event time. The iLAND staff will reply confirming the event time, location and details for each reservation. Admission is free.
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SIP/Watershed Event Locations and Times:
Friday, Oct 1
8:30am and 9:30am 59th St and 12th Avenue
4:30pm and 5:30pm 164th Street and the Hudson River
Saturday, Oct 2
10:30am and 11:30am Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center, Governors Island
4:00pm and 5:00pm Yankee Pier at Governors Island
Sunday, Oct 3
10:30am and 11:30am Yankee Pier at Governors Island
4:00pm and 5:00pm Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center, Governors Island
Oct 7
8:30am and 9:30am Nature Walk at Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant
4:30pm and 5:30pm Nature Walk at Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant
Oct 8
8:30am and 9:30am 164th Street and the Hudson River
4:30pm and 5:30pm 59th St and 12th Avenue
Oct 9
10:30am and 11:30am Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center, Governors Island
4:00pm and 5:00pm Yankee Pier at Governors Island
Oct 10
10:30am and 11:30am Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center, Governors Island
4:00pm and 5:00pm Yankee Pier at Governors Island
Combining the fields of dance, music, architecture and design artists, Jennifer Monson, Chris Cogburn, Maggie Bennett, Kate Cahill and Katrin Schnabl create a collaborative process that interweaves their forms through listening, framing, embodying, moving, diagramming, building and transforming. In this project they foreground the creative process through various activities and research that are immersive and intensive. These shared experiences include a trip to the headwaters of the Hudson River in the Adirondacks; visits with stream restoration projects in the Catskill Mountains around the Ashokan reservoir, NYC’s water source; walking/dancing/sounding along the rim of Manhattan, experiencing tidal and current shifts, sewage out puts, rainwater culverts, marine life and littoral biodiversity, and other human activities such as fishing, making-out and boating; We will share our individual practices and develop new ones out of our interactions with the places and systems we encounter.
There is a performative and public aspect implicit to our research process that permeates the public sphere, facilitating awareness of how everyday activities connect to and effect the larger systems we are a part of. The performances will take place at the liminal times of the day (2 hours after sunrise and before sunset).
This project is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council, a residency at Governors Island with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a commission from the American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance Program, the Electronic Music Foundation’s Ear to the Earth Festival, and creative research funds from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
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Presenters and participants included New School professors Ivan Raykoff, Philip Silva, Danielle Goldman, Neil Greenberg, Victoria Marshall, and Robert Sember; PARK collaborators Kathy Westwater, Seung Jae Lee and Jennifer Scappetonne; iLAND board members Elliott Maltby, Kate Cahill, Carolyn Hall and Julia Handschuh, Jennifer Monson; choreographer and improviser Susan Sgorbati, social scientist at the U.S. Forest Service, Erika Svendson; artist Kyle deCamp. Performance created by Athena Kokoronis. Workshops by E.J. McAdams; Liz Barry, Jessica Einhorn and Lailye Weidman of Higher E.D.; and Clarinda Mac Low of River to Creek.
Overview
Moving Into the Out There is iLAND’s fourth annual symposium on dance, movement, and the environment. The two-day event in the heart of New York City brings together dancers, choreographers, designers, ecologists, advocates, and scientists for interactive panel discussions, field workshops, and networking opportunities. This year’s symposium features an in-depth review of PARK, an environmental performance project at Fresh Kills Landfill supported by the 2011 iLAB Residency. Moving Into the Out There will also highlight iLAND’s recent efforts to synthesize insights and discoveries from the past seven years of iLAB collaborative residencies. Detailed event descriptions are attached.
Moving Into the Out There is an open forum for exploring new methods of understanding urban ecosystems through innovative collaborations between practitioners of movement, dance, science, and environmental management. iLAND cultivates a deeper engagement with urban environmental issues through its cross-disciplinary approach, and the annual symposium invites the general public to experience and explore recent works emerging from the iLAND community. Moving Into the Out There features the work of iLAND’s 2011 iLAB Residency, opening up the results of that collaborative experience to a wider audience for discussion.
Throughout the Symposium, participants share in the process of searching for shared language and collaborative processes that cut across the arts and sciences, focusing on dance and the body as primary mediators of experience, imagination, and knowing. Through Moving Into the Out There iLAND aims to generate conversation about collaborative practice throughout communities of art and science, instigating new ways of understanding and intervening in contemporary environmental problems – particularly those related to over-development and climate change.