Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices: Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront
a gathering around movement, science and the environment in New York City
April 18 2015 | 12 pm – 6 pm
Two Bridges Neighborhood Council: Goldie Chu Community Room | 82 Rutgers Slip NY, NY
Residency Workshops
Light refreshments will be served
Register HERE
Admission is free and open to the public.
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).
Resident Biographies
Embodied Mapping:
Since graduating with a B. Arch from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Kate Cahill has enjoyed collaborating on interdisciplinary teams and practicing architecture in New York and Beijing. Kate is a member of the iLAND board of directors and is a current student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she is pursuing a Masters in Urbanism, Landscape and Ecology.
Kathy Creutzburg is a public artist who has used the landscape to inspire her sculpture and mixed media installations at the Figment summer-long sculpture garden on Governors Island, Kenkeleba House sculpture garden, Abrons Art Center, Michael Mut Project Space, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Her recent restoration of public artworks originally created by herself and other artists at PS61M showcases her abilities as a designer, fabricator, and facilitator.
Meredith Drum creates experimental cinema and documentaries as linear videos, interactive installations, printed books and mobile media projects. Her work has been supported by grants and residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, iLAND, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Wassaic Project, the Experimental Television Center, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, ISSUE Project Room, HASTAC and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.
Joe Goldman, who lives in the Lower East Side, is a career documentary filmmaker & cinematographer / photographer interested in expressive studies about nature, seafaring, the human condition, and the art of dance.
Meredith Talusan‘s interdisciplinary practice encompasses writing, visual art, and dance, especially as they relate to transgender, queer, and racialized people. She is a current board member for iLAND.
Jennifer Wen Ma is a visual artist with an interdisciplinary practice that bridges varied media such as installation, video, drawing, performance, public art, and fashion design; often bringing together unlikely elements in a single piece, creating sensitive, poetic and poignant works. Ma has exhibited internationally and received an Emmy for her involvement in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics as the chief designer for visual and special effects.
Liza Zapol is an artist and oral historian. She creates sound, multimedia and performance on the themes of memory and place, using documentary methods.
The Urban Backstage:
Julie Kline is a Brooklyn-based actor, director, writer, and producer of new works for the theater, in both professional and community-based contexts, and a practitioner and teacher of inter-generational and senior theater. Recent work includes developing and directing the award-winning solo show MAGDALEN, based on the stories of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland, and conceiving and directing SENIORS AND THE CITY – original theater works based on the life-stories of Manhattan seniors, as part of two years of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s SPARC residency.
Clarinda Mac Low is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer working in many mediums, including collaboration on projects like this ILAND work. As part of her practice, she runs Culture Push, an arts organization dedicated to cross-sector exchange and nurturing good ideas.
Trained as a landscape architect, Elliott Maltby is a founding partner of thread collective, a professor at Pratt Institute, a lover of urban messiness and maps, and a fisherwoman. Her current work defines the idea of the urban backstage, both conceptually and through design proposals; a survey of New York City backstage spaces demonstrates a common pairing of productive spontaneous ecologies and aging infrastructure. These are novel landscapes, and rather than seeing them as derelict or underutilized, she is interested in the stealth success of these spaces.
Jeremy Pickard is the captain of Superhero Clubhouse, a collective of artists and scientists working at the intersection of environmentalism and theater. Jeremy runs three initiatives with his company: The Planet Plays (a series of nine stories that together form a new mythology for our changing world), Climate Collaborations (original performances for audiences of all ages created with climate scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), and Big Green Theater (an eco-playwriting program for Brooklyn fifth-graders, produced in partnership with The Bushwick Starr Theater).
Shawn Shafner has been inspiring critical conversations about sustainable sanitation throughout NYC and internationally since 2010 as creator of The People’s Own Organic Power Project (www.thePOOPproject.org). As a 2014-15 LABA Fellow, Shawn invites you to come to the 14th Street Y and explore the intersection between preserved personal narratives and fermented foods (www.labajournal.com).
Rachel Stevens is an interdisciplinary artist investigating materiality, media, site, and relationships between social and ecological systems. She is currently working on “Fish Stories Community Cookbook,” a project for Paths to Pier 42 in Lower Manhattan (in collaboration with Meredith Drum) and teaching in the Integrated Media Art MFA program at Hunter College.
Water + Im/migration:
H.T. Chen & Dian Dong, Chen Dance Center is a recognized leader in dance and a leading Asian American arts institution. CDC realizes its mission to provide moving experiences in the Asian American and contemporary dance through H.T. Chen & Dancers (a touring modern dance company) and the year-round, community-based performing arts School and Theater.
Carolyn Hall is a Brooklyn-based freelance dancer and historical marine ecologist. She has been an iLAND board member since 2011.
Michael Leibenluft is a New York-based theater director and instructor who has worked with Target Margin Theater, The Civilians, 59E59 Theaters, and the Drama League. He frequently directs projects in China as well, including recent work at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, and Drum Tower West Theater in Beijing.
Shirley Luo of the NY Bard Wo Association is a Cantonese opera professional.
Megan Kendzior is a Brooklyn based choreographer and arts advocate who hails from from Sarasota, Florida. Her dances have been presented by New York Live Arts and Danspace Project; She works for Movement Research and iLAND.
Emily Teng of the Chinese Musical & Theatrical Association of NY is a Cantonese opera professional.
Lu Yu is a teaching artist, director, choreographer as well as dancer, singer and actor in both Chinese and western theaters.
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.
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