iLAND

Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance

ArtsPool Member

Kathy Westwater

Kathy Westwater creates art that exists in the human body. Described by Dance Magazine as “bloodless and fascinating” and The Brooklyn Rail as “at the limits of the human,” her work responds to contemporary experience and the societal landscape in which it manifests by reimagining the body's movement potential. Developed in New York City, since 1996 her dances have been seen at New York Live Arts, Franklin Furnace, Danspace Project, Joyce SoHo, 92nd Street Y, Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Dixon Place, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Performance Space 122, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Pratt Institute, Reed College, and many parks and public spaces, among others. Westwater has received commissions from New York Live Arts and Danspace Project; and awards from Puffin Foundation, Franklin Furnace Fund, Meet the Composer, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the recipient of numerous residencies: New York Live Arts, Djerassi, Movement Research, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, iLAND, The Field, Rockbridge Artist Exchange, Millay Colony for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Pratt Institute. Since 2001, Westwater has taught at Sarah Lawrence College. Through workshops, talks, and writings she has explored the intersections of art and society at, most recently, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, UCLA, and Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Westwater received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence where she was awarded the Bessie Schönberg Scholarship, and a BA from William and Mary where she studied political economy and dance.

www.kathywestwater.org

Park

by

Collaborators: Choreographer Kathy Westwater, Poet Jennifer Scappettone, Architect Seung Jae Lee, and Trail-Builder Leigh Draper

PARK expressed forms of making and unmaking by exploring the conversion of the Fresh Kills Landfill into a park. The collaborators shared their practices in choreography, poetry, architecture, and trail-building to activate the landscape, articulating the site’s mutating topography, infrastructure, mass, and scale while evoking notions of proximity and distance between the public and the largely invisible contents of the landfill. Their work collapsed individual and collective remoteness from the landfill’s obscured function in the life of the city. PARK invited the public to enter a zone of visceral intimacy created within this expansive and alien, yet familiar landscape.

PARK is about what we destroy in order to create. Existing as both process and performance, it expresses forms of making and unmaking that engage wilderness, post-industrial spaces, and everyday landscapes. PARK locates the convergence of nature, industry, and individual experience of the wild and mundane daily life at large at Fresh Kills, New York.

Geographically situated away from the view of many of the city’s inhabitants, Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill in the world, is currently undergoing a 30-year conversion into a park.  The resident’s research includes exploring the translation of wilderness practices to the urban landfill-to-park site.

PARK seeks to activate the landscape, articulating the site’s mutating topography, infrastructure, mass, and scale while evoking notions of proximity and distance between the public and the largely invisible contents of the landfill, collapsing our individual and collective remoteness from its obscured function in the life of the city.

As New York continues to create a new use-value for the Fresh Kills Landfill, the PARK residency project – which culminates in a public event in Fall 2011 –represents an unprecedented engagement for project collaborators and the public with a unique site that has been largely inaccessible until now, though it is crucial to both the history and future of the city. PARK invites individual participants to enter into awareness of their own connections to this place, a monument to cycles of consumption in which we are all complicit; it invites the public to enter a zone of visceral intimacy created within this expansive and alien, yet familiar landscape.

Read more about their work together on their blog.

Moving into the Out There

by

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.