Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices

Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices Workshops

May 28, 2017 by

April 18 2015 | 12 pm – 6 pm

Two Bridges Neighborhood Council: Goldie Chu Community Room | 82 Rutgers Slip NY, NY

12pm – 1:45pm | Water + Im/migration | WORKSHOP

This workshop will explore themes of water and im/migration through both traditional and contemporary opera, music, dance, and theater practices. We will incorporate personal histories and trainings to investigate our relationship to the river (with traditional water & boat scenes from Chinese Opera serving as primary source material). We are engaged in a year-long experience of sharing our creative practices with one another and will utilize this workshop to share these practices with you.

Translation available into Chinese dialects.

The Water & Immigration iLAB Residency group includes HT Chen & Dian Dong (Chen Dance Center), Carolyn Hall (Dancer/Historical Marine Ecologist), Michael Leibenluft (Director), Shirley Luo (NY Bard Wo Association), Megan Kendzior (Choreographer/Arts Advocate), Emily Teng (Chinese Musical & Theatrical Association), and Lu Yu (Arts Educator/Actor).

1:45 – 2:15pm | Light refreshments will be provided.

2:15 – 4pm | Embodied Mapping | WORKSHOP

This workshop will engage the five senses in contemplating and recording boundary conditions in the Lower East Side. We will walk a path of edges and collaborate in small groups through a participatory mapping exercise that seeks to question our perception of edges through the lenses of media, memory, navigation and temporality. What are the qualities that signify a boundary? How do you know you are at an edge? How do we record a shift or change?

The Embodied Mapping iLAB Residency group includes Kate Cahill (Architect), Kathy Creutzburg (Sculptor/Public Artist), Meredith Drum (Intermedia artist), Joe Goldman (Photographer), Meredith Ramirez Talusan (Writer/artist/dancer), Jennifer Wen Ma (Interdisciplinary artist) and Liza Zapol (Artist / Oral Historian).

4:15 – 6pm | The Urban Backstage | WORKSHOP

The urban backstage is comprised of spaces in the city that, through accident, intention, design, loss, or neglect, allow urban residents to remove their masks, to make mistakes, to expose [or hide] things, thoughts and actions that may not be allowed elsewhere. Water infrastructure is another aspect of the urban backstage; our research explores the individual’s and the city’s relationship to water, waste, and the physical body. Teasing out hidden systems, we will trace the strands that connect people to water, and use these systems to connect us to the people. This is mirrored in thinking about the tendrils and buried histories of lost waterways, specifically the Little Wreck Brook that connected Collect Pond to the East River.

We will explore the following during our workshop:

+ bringing the bones to the surface [stories that reference this, specifically the Lenape Mother Corn narrative]

+ things that you bury, and things that come back up [trying to repress something that always re-emerges]

+ the irrepressible, an eruption, an outburst, a revolution [sanitary or otherwise]

The Urban Backstage iLAB Residency group includes Julie Kline (Theater Actor/ Director), Clarinda Mac Low (Interdisciplinary Artist), Elliott Maltby (Urban Designer/ Landscape Architect), Jeremy Pickard (Eco-Theater Artist), Shawn Shafner (Artist / Educator / Activist), and Rachel Stevens (Interdisciplinary Artist).

Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices Panel Discussion

May 28, 2017 by

April 17 2015 | 6pm – 8 pm

The South Street Seaport Museum: Melville Gallery | 213 Water Street New York NY

This panel will bring three distinctive perspectives to bear on the environmental and cultural legacies of the neighborhoods along the East River waterfront. Translation available into Chinese dialects.

Eric Sanderson will speak about his work reconstructing the ecology of the East River including Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.

Susan Cheng will speak of the relationship of various Chinese Opera forms as they developed in relation to waterways and migration from China to NYC’s Chinatown

William Kornblum sails a converted 1916 fishing boat throughout the waters of NYC. He will speak from his experiences and knowledge of the East River and its surrounding waterfront communities.

The panel will be moderated by iLAND founder Jennifer Monson and will be followed by an open discussion with the public with representatives from each iLAB residency (arts educator Lu Yu, interdisciplinary artist Clarinda Mac Low, and public artist Kathy Creutzberg).

Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices

April 4, 2015 by

Panelists included musician and executive director of Music of China, Susan Cheng; professor and writer, William Kornblum; conservation biologist, Eric Sanderson; teacher and performer, Lu Yu; media artist Clarinda Mac Low and sculptor, Kathy Creutzberg. Workshops were lead by iLAB residents from The Urban Backstage, Embodied Mapping and Water + Im/migration.

Symposium Overview

What: Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices: Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront is a two-day event in the Lower East Side brings together contemporary choreographers, Chinese Opera artists, designers, visual and theater artists, architects, ecologists, advocates and scientists for a panel and discussion on Friday evening and a series of workshops on Saturday afternoon. The workshops are led by the 2014/15 iLAB residencies: The Urban Backstage, Embodied Mapping and Water + Im/migration. These three residency teams are currently engaging in collaborative processes and creative methodologies to explore cultural and ecological activity around the East River waterfront.

Why: Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices – Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront is an open forum for exploring new methods of understanding art and science through innovative collaborations between practitioners of seemingly disparate disciplines. The iLAND Symposium is a multi-faceted platform where artists and scientists can examine best practices for interdisciplinary projects, and make these available to a broader community by facilitating dialogue about contemporary issues and themes. These conversations also create a more direct bridge to the scientific community. Throughout the Symposium, participants engage 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 and imagination. This year’s residencies were developed in as part of iLAB East River, a partnership between iLAND and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, with the aim of engaging local artists to participate and to explore existing and potential perceptions and uses of the changing LES waterfront through their different disciplinary perspectives.

Who: iLAND – interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance – founded by Jennifer Monson in 2004, investigates the power of dance, in collaboration with other fields, to illuminate our kinetic understanding of the world. It is a dance research organization with a fundamental commitment to environmental sustainability as it relates to art and the urban context. Our goal is to cultivate cross-disciplinary research among artists, environmentalists, scientists, urban designers, and other fields. For more information, please visit ilandart.org or email info@ilandart.org.

In 2014, iLAND’s Jennifer Monson began to work closely with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) to help inform the organization’s work along the East River’s waterfront. In 2013, LMCC launched the Arts East River Waterfront initiative to bring artists, designers and local cultural organizations into collaboration with community partners to activate Piers 42 and 35 on the Lower East River Waterfront with arts, culture and educational projects and public programming. The nearby Pier 35 is currently under construction as a new Eco-Pier, scheduled for completion in 2017. Building upon years of community advocacy and interest in the development of these new waterfront sites as an amenity for local residents, LMCC seeks to model arts and cultural activities that respond to the unique features of these sites, and reflect the needs, interests and history of the neighborhood –taking into account community priorities for the waterfront that range from leisure uses to resiliency planning in the wake of Super Storm Sandy. Through the partnership project Paths to Pier 42, LMCC and its partners are currently activating Pier 42 with arts, culture, design and educational projects and programming while the Pier awaits permanent redevelopment by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. With the iLAB East River project, iLAND and LMCC are providing development residencies and community engagement opportunities to three artist-lead groups working in the Lower East Side and Chinatown, envisioning projects for the East River Waterfront.

The 2015 iLAND Symposium is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.