APE@HAWLEY & SCDT present
ARTIST RETROSPECTIVE
APE@Hawley and SCDT offer this online retrospective of the artists that have shared work at 33 Hawley over the past two years. In this disruptive time of social distancing and reconfiguring, ART STILL GOES ON! Please enjoy these contributions and pass along links to others who might be interested! Learn more about APE@HAWLEY's mission CLICK ON AN ARTIST TO READ ABOUT THEM AND THEIR WORK, OR SCROLL DOWN BELOW! |
SARA SMITH
"Octomatia" and other excerpts from INT
Bodies In Motion, 2020 Dispatch from Greenfield, MA (occupied Pocomtuc territory) where I live with my partner and our cat: Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “All responses to the world take place within our bodies.” I feel this period of uncertainty, loss, and potential change between my shoulder blades, behind my eyeballs, in my gut. The unease floats. I know that it’s also lodged in some places I can’t yet feel. |
My sense of time expands and contracts, and this is having an adverse effect on how well (not well) my brain is processing information. The implications of various conceptions of time are one of my obsessions, so this state is weirdly kind of exciting, even as it’s unsettling. I’m building an improvisational solo called “one second per second” to trick myself into staying interested instead of freaking out.
My time and body are pre-committed much of the week to a job I am doing from home, and my home—previously a place of rest and art making—is now also my job site. Long days of video meetings have replaced the enlivening relational space of in-person interactions with colleagues and students. We are all anxious. I am fortunately relieved of the burden of financial, food, and/or housing insecurity that so many face. But I am disappointed to note how quickly I reach the limits of my capacity. I try not to grieve the lost time for creative production along with everything else. I believe that daily practices build us, so I ask:
My time and body are pre-committed much of the week to a job I am doing from home, and my home—previously a place of rest and art making—is now also my job site. Long days of video meetings have replaced the enlivening relational space of in-person interactions with colleagues and students. We are all anxious. I am fortunately relieved of the burden of financial, food, and/or housing insecurity that so many face. But I am disappointed to note how quickly I reach the limits of my capacity. I try not to grieve the lost time for creative production along with everything else. I believe that daily practices build us, so I ask:
What am I training through this regimen of cyber-sociality? Through my resistance to it?
What practices can I put in place to deliberately counteract what I want to reject?
What practices can I put in place to deliberately counteract what I want to reject?
For the past two years I have been developing a utopian performance project based on the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa and lessons learned from octopus and bacterial biologies. It's set in a geopolitically borderless future world, in which humans communicate through bacteria and navigate a dynamically interdependent existence with non-human animals, plants, and planetary systems. This means we have to balance our own happiness and health with the conflicting needs of other beings and forces. The present pandemic brings the lessons and questions of this project closer to me. It feels even more urgent to understand how our symbiotic selves make a composite, distributed body, and to imagine positive changes suggested by that orientation. The hardest part is staying with the truth that I’m connected even to those I don’t want to be.
SARA SMITH is an interdisciplinary choreographer and librarian who creates speculative documentary performances and other works which traverse dance, sound, visual art, and writing. Sara is invested in creative practices that consider the interconnected poetics and politics of embodied research.
www.sarasmithprojects.com
SARA SMITH is an interdisciplinary choreographer and librarian who creates speculative documentary performances and other works which traverse dance, sound, visual art, and writing. Sara is invested in creative practices that consider the interconnected poetics and politics of embodied research.
www.sarasmithprojects.com
INT (In Network Time) excerpt from Sara Smith on Vimeo. "INT (In Network Time)" excerpt, by Sara Smith. Performer-collaborators: Meredith Bove, Barbie Diewald, Karinne Keithley Syers
|
INT Future Oral Histories from Sara Smith on Vimeo. "INT Future Oral Histories" by Sara Smith
|
TORI LAWRENCE
JUNKSPACE
Bodies In Motion, 2020
WHERE I LIVE/CREATE AND IMPACT OF SOCIAL DISTANCING: I’m currently in rural Vermont. I feel lucky to be here within the mountains and the lake nearby. I am constantly amazed by the VT landscape (perhaps because it is so different than where I grew up) and find it to be endlessly rich in beauty. We're still getting the occasional dust of snow here, but hopefully it will warm up enough to be outside for longer stretches. During this time of social distance, I've been meeting with my Middlebury students online, going on long bike rides or drives, and taking up new hobbies like woodworking and improvising the piano. I have been busy editing a few of my dance films that I am hoping to release later this Summer/Fall. I've also been busy creating www.movementcrossings.com for my students in an effort for us to continue to improvise and make work together in these shifting times.
Movement Crossings features a collection of improvisation/composition/somatic scores and prompts compiled by an amazing group of artists. [They're kind of like improvisation class podcasts that you can take and listen to without being tethered to a computer screen.] I’m hoping that the site will be used by other students/educators/artists as a way to share/evolve a collective teaching practice. I’m finding ways for my improvisation students to still practice together [remotely] as an ensemble, but within this unrooted/unknown span. I don't have a clear idea of where I'll be living/working next year, but I'm listening to what my mentors have taught me (and what I now teach my students) of continuously showing up and being open to the outcome.
As a filmmaker, I often question if we're in an age of over-archivation and documentation, an overstimulation of information and making the fleeting permanent/immortal. Should our books and our projects outlast us? I wonder about the future of dance and how it is passed/shared. What is chosen to remain in the frame and what do we edit out? Who becomes archived? How much information do we gather from a digital body as we see it in a Zoom class or on a film? I wonder about the future body as it converses with the digital progressions. How do I bring these questions into my evolving practice?
Bodies In Motion, 2020
WHERE I LIVE/CREATE AND IMPACT OF SOCIAL DISTANCING: I’m currently in rural Vermont. I feel lucky to be here within the mountains and the lake nearby. I am constantly amazed by the VT landscape (perhaps because it is so different than where I grew up) and find it to be endlessly rich in beauty. We're still getting the occasional dust of snow here, but hopefully it will warm up enough to be outside for longer stretches. During this time of social distance, I've been meeting with my Middlebury students online, going on long bike rides or drives, and taking up new hobbies like woodworking and improvising the piano. I have been busy editing a few of my dance films that I am hoping to release later this Summer/Fall. I've also been busy creating www.movementcrossings.com for my students in an effort for us to continue to improvise and make work together in these shifting times.
Movement Crossings features a collection of improvisation/composition/somatic scores and prompts compiled by an amazing group of artists. [They're kind of like improvisation class podcasts that you can take and listen to without being tethered to a computer screen.] I’m hoping that the site will be used by other students/educators/artists as a way to share/evolve a collective teaching practice. I’m finding ways for my improvisation students to still practice together [remotely] as an ensemble, but within this unrooted/unknown span. I don't have a clear idea of where I'll be living/working next year, but I'm listening to what my mentors have taught me (and what I now teach my students) of continuously showing up and being open to the outcome.
As a filmmaker, I often question if we're in an age of over-archivation and documentation, an overstimulation of information and making the fleeting permanent/immortal. Should our books and our projects outlast us? I wonder about the future of dance and how it is passed/shared. What is chosen to remain in the frame and what do we edit out? Who becomes archived? How much information do we gather from a digital body as we see it in a Zoom class or on a film? I wonder about the future body as it converses with the digital progressions. How do I bring these questions into my evolving practice?
CURRENT RESEARCH/THOUGHTS: My site-oriented performative and cinematic work is determined and directed by associational relationships between the body and landscapes/buildings/architecture. My work becomes part of the site as a way of surveying/measuring the resources that are already there, reorganizing the composition of the space, and then reorienting how it is seen. I work with the dancing body as a means to code and recode a site. I recode environments as a means to branch into other fantastical worlds of possibility – to move beyond the assumed properties of place and inscribed movement pathways. The undoing as a generative act and therefore a possibility for change.
As irregular topographies are bulldozed into a flatness, I feel a destabilization, an ungrounded transience of always traveling through somewhere and not having a home. Art historian Miwon Kwon states that “we are out of place all to often” and that “the intensifying |
conditions of such spatial undifferentiation and departicularization – fueled by an ongoing globalization of technology and telecommunications to accommodate an ever-expanding capitalist order – exacerbate the effects of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life."
TORI LAWRENCE
Tori Lawrence is a choreographer/filmmaker and the 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence at Middlebury College where she teaches Movement and Media, Advanced Improvisation, and Technique Workshop. She creates immersive site-specific performances, interdisciplinary installations, and digital/analog screendance projects. Her environmentally-based work inspires an imaginative and sustainable way of looking at, thinking about, and using space. Her recent dance film projects have been funded by New England Foundation for the Arts, Lighton International Artists Exchange, Dance Films Association, and supported by residencies/fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, Ucross Foundation, Charlotte Street Foundation, Dance Ireland, and Budapest's Workshop Foundation. Her current site-adaptive performance project "JUNKSPACE" was presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Sweden's Brunakra Residency Program, and Bodies in Motion Festival (presented by School for Contemporary Dance & Thought and A.P.E.@Hawley).
WEBSITE: www.torilawrence.org
INSTAGRAM: @torilawrenceco
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/torilawrenceco
TORI LAWRENCE
Tori Lawrence is a choreographer/filmmaker and the 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence at Middlebury College where she teaches Movement and Media, Advanced Improvisation, and Technique Workshop. She creates immersive site-specific performances, interdisciplinary installations, and digital/analog screendance projects. Her environmentally-based work inspires an imaginative and sustainable way of looking at, thinking about, and using space. Her recent dance film projects have been funded by New England Foundation for the Arts, Lighton International Artists Exchange, Dance Films Association, and supported by residencies/fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, Ucross Foundation, Charlotte Street Foundation, Dance Ireland, and Budapest's Workshop Foundation. Her current site-adaptive performance project "JUNKSPACE" was presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Sweden's Brunakra Residency Program, and Bodies in Motion Festival (presented by School for Contemporary Dance & Thought and A.P.E.@Hawley).
WEBSITE: www.torilawrence.org
INSTAGRAM: @torilawrenceco
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/torilawrenceco
KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERSUntitled Prairie Trilogy
Bodies In Motion, 2020 I was already unemployed this spring, so this extended stay at home season met me where I was, with the addition of my kid, who is 8, and who I now keep company for many more hours of the day than I did before. I started “homeschool” attempting to translate something like a school day schedule to our days together, and gradually gave up on it, tending toward more and more expansively free and lightly unsupervised time in the woods behind our house, more reading, more music. Although I am one of those people who is constantly making something, usually many things, I have always been comfortable yielding to the anti-productive subterranean imperatives of the uncontrollable calendar of when and how things come to fruition. In other years I habitually sought out showing dates to just force the flowers to the surface — I’m aware that glacial subterranean imperative needs a counterbalance in the invitation to surface. But I find this home season wants no calendar, that the only way to meet it is to surrender to an unbounded way of thinking about time. In its absence, I am trying to patiently corral an impulse toward surfacing that isn’t structured by dates, but by some other motor. |
I miss the delicate intensity of gathering. I have an active fantasy, for when this is over, of starting a community theater company called Weird Village, and doing a loose adaptation of Cymbeline, after reading Ali Smith’s beautiful, stunning (as all her books are) Winter, in which Cymbeline makes an appearance as a figure of thought. I’ve never read it, and it seems like a crazy play, but my policy is generally to take what comes.
KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS
Karinne Keithley Syers has made things in performance, audio, video, and book forms. In addition to performing, she has been a publisher, an enthusiast, a scholar, a participant-historian, a posse-forming shit-talker, and a teacher.
Amherst, MA
www.fancystitchmachine.org
tinyletter.com/the_pelagic_school
KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS
Karinne Keithley Syers has made things in performance, audio, video, and book forms. In addition to performing, she has been a publisher, an enthusiast, a scholar, a participant-historian, a posse-forming shit-talker, and a teacher.
Amherst, MA
www.fancystitchmachine.org
tinyletter.com/the_pelagic_school
YANIRA CASTROAUTHOR
Bodies In Motion, 2020 Take class with Yanira via @freeskewl Remote Broadcast At the beginning there was a lot to organize. There were schedules to map out, a family work-out regimen to devise, a “temporary” classroom to set up, grocery runs for ourselves and others to suit up and plan for like we were the cast of The Walking Deaddoing a run for supplies: get in and out as fast as possible, don’t touch anything. At the start, I longed for stillness. So much so that I wrote it on the wall above my desk: I desire stillness.
Space for grieving. Space for observing Writing those three lines is the most quiet I have been able to achieve.
Sheltering-in-place hasn’t been an artist residency, for me, like some joked on my social media feed. Put it on your resumes! Covid-19 Residency, Mar 2019 - ??? 20??. At the beginning, a week in…. Anna Maynard contacted me as my son and I were learning how to navigate Zoom. She and her collaborators were starting a school online, @freeskewl. They had devised it in a day or two it seemed to me. Out of thin air… poof!….there was a roster of teachers. Would I teach something? I admired the ingenuity and the immediacy: “We need this…. abracadabra… magic!” But I also know how much labor it takes to make things appear from nothing and how much that labor goes under resourced even while deeply valued. I took a week to say “yes”—to allow myself to devote the labor to the cause and to devise something that I thought might be worth the while in a time so uncertain. |
I developed #promptsforplayandlightness as the thing I longed for, a meditative time to devise for yourself. Not a time to follow instruction. But rather a time where you could be in the space you are in every day and observe it, inhabit it, let it feed your imagination. The mantra for the class, “It will be simple because anything else is unnecessary.” It was a response to the time and a way to attend.
Each class, after looking at and talking about other artists’ scores, would settle down into a single prompt for creating a score for 20 minutes. During those 20 minutes, I would devise an environment for zoom that you could ignore or come in/out of or immerse yourself in.
Each class, after looking at and talking about other artists’ scores, would settle down into a single prompt for creating a score for 20 minutes. During those 20 minutes, I would devise an environment for zoom that you could ignore or come in/out of or immerse yourself in.
Prompt:
Locate a series of points in your room.
Think dimensionally.
Organize these locations as a drawing.
Be attentive to the detail between locations and the location themselves.
Are there connectors?
Locate a series of points in your room.
Think dimensionally.
Organize these locations as a drawing.
Be attentive to the detail between locations and the location themselves.
Are there connectors?
What delighted me about the scores that arose from these prompts was the empathy that people would invest in their objects and their spaces. The ways in which they would worry for their couch, pity their wastebasket, tend to their plants.
I did four classes before I had to leave for a project much too large to speak about here but suffice to say that it is a political project that concerns itself with the future of the dance field and how to ensure and devise and work towards an equitable future. It is daunting. Sheltering-in-place has made me long for stillness but it has demanded action. Again: devotion, labor, cause, under resourced, deeply valued. This is a cycle that needs to change.
I am grateful for that class and those humans I met with weekly for a month to unburden ourselves for a short period of time and with a prompt create something in the uncertain unknown.
You can see the four prompts and try them yourself at freeskewl/movement crossing’s website: https://www.movementcrossings.com/post/promptsforplayandlightness. The website itself is another example of labor, devotion, the creation of resources. Thank you, Tori.
Attend to yourself, attend to others, attend to your space and to the world beyond that space that needs the justice we ALL need to survive.
With love from Brooklyn in Lenapehoking.
YANIRA CASTRO
Yanira Castro is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist living in NYC. Since 2009, she has made performances, videos, and installations with a team of collaborators under the moniker, a canary torsi. a canary torsi's practice has involved creating systems, scores, and software programs that ensure that elements of performance (choreography, text, music, environment) unfold in real time in response to the presence/participation of the audience, often building the work in real time as a communal act. The work has been presented extensively in NYC and has toured nationally. Castro has received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production and a NYFA Choreography Fellowship as well as various commissions, residencies and project grant awards. Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College. Her mentors include Wendy Woodson, Suzanne Dougan, Peter Lobdell, Jim Coleman, Terese Freedman and Peter Schmitz.
WEBSITE: www.acanarytorsi.org
INSTAGRAM: @aCanaryTorsi
FACEBOOK: @acanarytorsi and @Yaniracastro
I did four classes before I had to leave for a project much too large to speak about here but suffice to say that it is a political project that concerns itself with the future of the dance field and how to ensure and devise and work towards an equitable future. It is daunting. Sheltering-in-place has made me long for stillness but it has demanded action. Again: devotion, labor, cause, under resourced, deeply valued. This is a cycle that needs to change.
I am grateful for that class and those humans I met with weekly for a month to unburden ourselves for a short period of time and with a prompt create something in the uncertain unknown.
You can see the four prompts and try them yourself at freeskewl/movement crossing’s website: https://www.movementcrossings.com/post/promptsforplayandlightness. The website itself is another example of labor, devotion, the creation of resources. Thank you, Tori.
Attend to yourself, attend to others, attend to your space and to the world beyond that space that needs the justice we ALL need to survive.
With love from Brooklyn in Lenapehoking.
YANIRA CASTRO
Yanira Castro is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist living in NYC. Since 2009, she has made performances, videos, and installations with a team of collaborators under the moniker, a canary torsi. a canary torsi's practice has involved creating systems, scores, and software programs that ensure that elements of performance (choreography, text, music, environment) unfold in real time in response to the presence/participation of the audience, often building the work in real time as a communal act. The work has been presented extensively in NYC and has toured nationally. Castro has received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production and a NYFA Choreography Fellowship as well as various commissions, residencies and project grant awards. Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College. Her mentors include Wendy Woodson, Suzanne Dougan, Peter Lobdell, Jim Coleman, Terese Freedman and Peter Schmitz.
WEBSITE: www.acanarytorsi.org
INSTAGRAM: @aCanaryTorsi
FACEBOOK: @acanarytorsi and @Yaniracastro
liturgy: a rite or body of rites prescribed for public worship; a customary repertoire of ideas, phrases, or observances; a participatory public ritual.
|
DEBORAH GOFFE
LITURGY | ORDER | BRIDGE
Bodies In Motion, 2020 Conceived by Deborah Goffe and performed with Lauren Horn and Arien Wilkerson, this ongoing process has centered dance as the organizing principle in a liturgy (a ritualized public ceremony) that is imagined to stir personal, interpersonal, and communal stuck places. Dance has long been leveraged as a way to reconcile the relationship between the expressive body, imagination, realms, liberatory practices, and aesthetic impulse. Here Goffe activates her own garden by visioning broadly and close to home. What might it mean to engage dance practice as faith practice, performance as communal ceremony, performance space as consecrated site, and the fellowship of shared witness, place, and inheritance? What are the possibilities of “feeling you feeling me.” |
"My current workspace is Holyoke, MA. In the months prior to this current global health crisis, I was engrossed in a relatively productive (and overwhelming) art making period. Right now, while learning to manage the bustle of my day job from home, I am trying to learn what this moment wants to teach me about the tyranny of productivity, and the desperate need to catch my breath. So, I cannot make great claims to prolific artistic activity at this time. Instead, I am thinking a lot about the ways the arts ecosystems (at every scale) will be forever changed by our current circumstances, what strategies we will employ to navigate the emerging new world, as well as what, how and why I might want to make next. We'll see."
DEBORAH GOFFE is a dance maker, performer, educator, and performance curator who cultivates environments and experiences through choreographic, design and social processes. Through Scapegoat Garden (a Connecticut-based creative engine) and other platforms, Deborah strives to forge relationships between artists and communities, helping people see, create and contribute to a greater vision of ourselves, each other, and the places we call home. Deborah’s work is also driven by her enduring commitment to the support of vibrant local dance ecologies, and the role of curatorial practice in that process. Her most recent research attends to the intersection of sustainable dance practice, locality, arts ecosystem formation, habits of perception, and black radical tradition(s). Together these commitments inform her work and teaching at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where she serves as Assistant Professor of Modern-Contemporary Dance.
WEBSITE: www.scapegoatgarden.org
Instagram: @scapegoatgarden
JENNIFER NUGENT
up against
Bodies In Motion, 2020 Take class with Jen via @freeskewl "My practice is fueled by physical and metaphysical relationships. My artistry is my practice as a parent, a partner, a friend, and a human. I want to move, and be moved by information that is not coming from myself alone. When I am embedded inside collaboration or an exchange with an audience, I experience intimacy, directness, and the honesty that comes from not being able to hide. This exchange propels me to constantly shift and change, wanting to assert myself, while experiencing destabilizing sensations of clarity and confusion. I am committed to the pursuit of relentless awareness of who I am, who I am not, and how I relate to others. I want to share and listen. I also wonder about existence, pause, process, and individuation within performance and teaching. I want my dancing to lead me towards uncharted and indeterminate spaces. When I dance I feel both powerful and lost. The intellectual and physical rigor of dance continues to present me with a sense of humility, a play of transmission between listening and doing. Within my work, I connect with myself through a process of being both a dancer and a feeling/desiring/living being who becomes revealed through the practice of performance. Performance has the ability to capture who I am and reveal this information to me, in the exact moment that it is happening; it is an exquisite sensation, and for this I am grateful." |
Every evening at 7pm my neighbors and people all over the city go to their windows to clap, scream, hoot, and cheer for the doctors and nurses (in the process of their shift change) taking care of the so many people infected by the Coronavirus. Every time I do this ritual I have an experience of ensemble, a more than one, a larger than. It feels hopeful, melancholy, it is a release from the day, and a way for me and my family to gather for those few minutes and be in a kind of solidarity with so many and each other. We see each other. We use our vocal sounds. Sometimes it is cathartic and sometimes funny, even vulnerable.
I am trying to practice pause, gratitude, and patience. Or ….I am trying to remember to practice pause, gratitude, and patience :)
I am in thought I am not in production I am in process and imperfection
I am fortunately and unfortunately very real- is there a choice?"
JEN NUGENT:
Originally from South Florida, I now reside in Brooklyn, NY. I have been performing since age sixteen, most notably with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from 2009-2014 and David Dorfman Dance from 1999-2007. My practices are profoundly inspired by Daniel Lepkoff, Wendell Beavers, Patty Townsend, and an ongoing collaboration with Paul Matteson. Currently I am working on a new solo project, Up Against, which uses dance (steps, improvisation, shape, and gesture) as a way to articulate my curiosities and allow the vibration and energies that surface within the process of being in the studio to reverberate inside the performance. Recently I was an artist in residence at the Bodies in Motion Festival supported by A.P.E.@Hawley and the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA. I am a teaching artist at Gibney Dance NYC, Movement Research NYC, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Sarah Lawrence College, NY.
I am trying to practice pause, gratitude, and patience. Or ….I am trying to remember to practice pause, gratitude, and patience :)
I am in thought I am not in production I am in process and imperfection
I am fortunately and unfortunately very real- is there a choice?"
JEN NUGENT:
Originally from South Florida, I now reside in Brooklyn, NY. I have been performing since age sixteen, most notably with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from 2009-2014 and David Dorfman Dance from 1999-2007. My practices are profoundly inspired by Daniel Lepkoff, Wendell Beavers, Patty Townsend, and an ongoing collaboration with Paul Matteson. Currently I am working on a new solo project, Up Against, which uses dance (steps, improvisation, shape, and gesture) as a way to articulate my curiosities and allow the vibration and energies that surface within the process of being in the studio to reverberate inside the performance. Recently I was an artist in residence at the Bodies in Motion Festival supported by A.P.E.@Hawley and the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA. I am a teaching artist at Gibney Dance NYC, Movement Research NYC, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Sarah Lawrence College, NY.
Three excerpts:
1. Note the Self - Work in Progress - American Dance Festival 2017 (in collaboration with Paul Matteson) 2. another piece apart - Premiere - New York Live Arts, NYC 2018 (in collaboration with Paul Matteson) 3. up against - Residency Showing - Bodies in Motion Festival, Northampton, MA 2020 |
Short clip of my recent teaching as part of the freeskewl platform.
Instagram: @freeskewl |