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STREET-TREE STEWARDANCE: Urban Forest Stewardship as Movement Practice
STEWARDANCE will explore and build a collaborative language and process between dance and street-tree stewardship. Philip Silva and choreographer Jackie Dowd envision their shared creative process as embodied research. Through their investigations they will address the following questions:
1) How do street-tree stewardship and dance each structure the way we gather information through the senses about NYC's urban forest? What information does each discipline prioritize? Do they personalize or de-personalize their findings? What effect does this have on the researcher, project, and public?
2) How do dance and street-tree stewardship each approach the idea of "functionality?" How do they each understand the envisioning of a "goal," and the process of "reaching" it?
3) Can we conceive of every step in the stewardship process as choreography? From learning the ecological systems of the urban forest, to sharing information between teachers, community groups, computer scientists, and public street life, to entering data for an online map, to accomplishing the physical stewardship tasks, how does a consideration of choreography influence each element of the stewardship process?
STREET-TREE STEWARDANCE: Urban Forest Stewardship as Movement Practice
The ways Jackie practices dance, and Phil practices street-tree stewardship, share a commitment to sensory aptitude, awareness, and presence. However, these two applications of their senses have previously sought different ends: in stewardship, Phil used the senses to amass information as fact, and in dance, Jackie used them to connect to information as subjective experience. The STEWARDANCE collaborators will engage the heightened inner awareness and emotional vigor of dance with the material groundedness of ecological stewardship as an embodied sustainability strategy, which will be their mode of operation as they undertake each stewardship task: learning the ecological systems of the urban forest, gathering scientific data, physically laboring at stewardship, dialoguing with passerby, and coordinating team members. These experiments will occur wherever the task does- on the street, in the classroom, and in each of our own sensate bodies.
Project Collaborators
Philip Silva is Program Manager for GreenBridge at Brooklyn Botanic Garden with wide ranging experience working on urban environmental policy and stewardship initiatives. He has managed street tree projects in Hunts Point for Sustainable South Bronx, created standards for community gardening governance in Prospect Heights, and developed advocacy-based curricula for environmental stewards throughout the city.
Jackie Dodd is a Brooklyn-based emerging choreographer and dancer whose work ranges from concert dance, musical theatre, site-specific performance, physical therapy research (on contact improvisation with Parkinson's Disease patients), to community work with ex-convicts, senior citizens, and disadvantaged youth.
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