Ep 12: Exploring Dance and Environment with Jennifer Monson

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Welcome to Dance Unscripted.
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I am your host, Amy Elizabeth, and on this episode, we will be joined by Jennifer Monson.
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Jennifer is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and dance curator who balances her artistic research and choreographic work between New York City and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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Since 1983, she has explored strategies in choreography, improvisation, and collaboration in experimental dance.
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In 2000, her work took on a radical new trajectory towards the relationship between dance and environment.
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This has led her into an investigation of cultural and scientific understandings of large-scale phenomenon such as animal navigation and migration, geological formations such as aquifers and refunction sites such as the abandoned Ridgewood Reservoir.
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These investigations provide the means to unearth and inquire into choreographic and embodied ways of knowing and reimagining our relationship to the environments, spaces we inhabit.
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I'm intrigued to talk more with Jennifer regarding her work and how it brings into question the ways we move impacts and how we relate to and invites us into nuanced understandings of land, belonging, and the impacts of settler colonialism has had on severing these connections.
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Jennifer, It is a pleasure to have you join us
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today.
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Thank you.
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It's a delight to be here, Amy.
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Thank you so much for the invitation.
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Yes.
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Let's
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begin with you.
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Can you provide us with a little background on your experiences in dance and how those experiences led you to your current research?
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I've been dancing since I was fairly young, like five years old or something.
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I was fortunate to be introduced to creative movement in my elementary school, continued to dance with a teacher in my community.
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And so from an early age, I knew that dance was something that had to be part of my life.
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I went to University of California at Santa Barbara for my freshman year of college, and I was double majoring in biology and dance.
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I was really interested in animal behavior.
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That first summer, I ended up going to Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, and I met some amazing choreographers, very young choreographers who had just graduated from college.
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It was Vicki Marks, Elise Bernhardt, and Stephen Koplowitz, who happened to be interns there.
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And they really encouraged me to come to New York.
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And so I ended up going to Sarah Lawrence.
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Vicki and Elise had just graduated, so I ended up doing my undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, where I continued to focus on dance and animal behavior and science.
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They have a very open model for education.
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So you kind of decide what you want to do and how you want to focus.
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And the summers that I was, my summers I would spend in New York and it was right when movement research was getting started.
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So movement research is a dance research organization based in New York that was founded by artists who wanted to collectively share the responsibilities of putting out flyers and shared information.
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And now it's a much, much, much more established organization that operates all kinds of ways of supporting artists in New York and globally as well.
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It was amazing to be introduced to that organization early on in my career.
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So I had opportunities to take workshops and teach some and PS120 Performance Space 122 was just getting off the ground when I graduated from college.
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And that was a really lively group of artists who started that organization.
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So I was able to do things like open movement and and music dance.
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And we organized morning moving dance classes.
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And I curated an improvisational festival called Hot House and then brought in other people to curate that as well.
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When I first got out of college, I met the amazing choreographer Poo Kay and got to work with her for a little bit.
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And I met a lot of people through introducing myself, introducing to the other dancers that were working with her and that sort of community of young choreographers that were involved in the downtown New York dancing So I had that kind of career as a dance artist in New York.
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And about the end of the 90s, I grew up in California and had this sort of longing to integrate my relationship with sort of a complicated term.
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To use a term like nature, it has many different meanings.
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But I...
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I think I was longing to get outside of the urban setting and be in sites that were more wild or be in the land more.
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And I was hanging out in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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And there's these abandoned sites that are now developed.
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It looks like Miami there now.
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But when I was living in Williamsburg in the 90s, there were these empty lots along the East River.
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And it was a site where I would go walk my dog.
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And I began to notice that there were just a lot of migrating birds, ducks and geese.
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And there were more mockingbirds and kestrels and cormorants and mergansers.
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And I was like, hmm, that's so interesting that the city is a spot where they stop in their migration.
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And I started thinking about How they were moving south to South America and headed north in the fall, in the summer towards the Arctic.
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And somehow I got this idea that I would follow the migrations of birds.
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And that is the beginning of this project called Bird Brain that I did for like four to six years.
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And funny enough, the first migration that we did wasn't birds.
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It was actually gray whales because they have a long migration.
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from Mexico up the Pacific coast to Vancouver and further north.
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And then the second migration we did was ospreys.
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And I actually chose gray whales and ospreys because there were scientists who were doing satellite tracking programs with them at that time.
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And that was really the early stages of satellite tracking technology.
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So whales were big enough to actually put the technology on.
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It took a while to get them to get the technology to be small enough to put on a bird without disturbing their flight.
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So we were able to study the movements that these scientists were getting from the movement of the whales and integrate that into the choreography with the whales and with the ospreys.
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And then the third migration, we followed ducks and geese up the Mississippi Flyway from Texas all the way to Minnesota.
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And all along the way, I really wanted to be in the similar circumstances that the migrating animals were.
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So we camped the whole way.
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stopped in little sites that were places that the birds and the whales might stop.
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Often there was a national estuarine estuary program or a state park or county park or a national wildlife refuge.
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So we partnered with all these different organizations that had an emphasis on habitat preservation and wildlife management and environmental education and also with arts organizations.
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It was wonderful to meet all these local community based organizations who really were thinking about the environment about migration the larger kind of cultural parallels between the way especially in California there was this exchange of Mexican migrants coming up to work in the fields and going back to their families and it was an incredible project it just completely changed my life and the dancers that went with me and so what When I finished that project, I went back to New York, and I was so inspired by the information I was getting from the scientists, the shared knowledge with the community partners, that I decided to start I-LAND.
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And I found some folks that were interested in founding it with me, so I've had a good, strong board of directors.
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And I-LAND stands for Indisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance.
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And I wanted to create opportunities for other artists and scientists to collaborate on projects, not to just focus on my own work, but create a community of people who are invested in this kind of research.
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So for 13 years, we offered residencies in New York City.
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And yeah, that's basically how I got where I am now.
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I
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mean, this is incredible.
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If we can circle back, I've...
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Two inquiring questions that pop up when you were talking about this is, what did being in the actual environment with...
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your study subjects, right?
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So we're with the birds and we're on the campsites and we're going into these environments that they're in.
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How did that enhance not only the research and information for you, but the dance itself?
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And then my second question, which I think some of our audience, we're going to call non-dance identifying audience, may be kind of curious about how that translates from bird, from nature into an action.
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So if we can start with how being in the environment with them, how does that feed into the research?
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It feeds in in several ways.
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One, just to have the opportunity to adjust and adapt and notice the weather in a really specific way and attend to when we felt rain coming or when it was hot or dry or getting into the diurnal cycle, going to sleep when it got dark, waking up when it was light.
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studied a lot of the ways that animals navigate.
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And of course, animals have very similar strategies to humans.
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They use their senses.
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Their senses are tuned in particular ways that I sort of imagine that humans could, our imaginations can allow us to think of that.
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For example, speaking with Scott Wiedensahl, who wrote this beautiful book about birds, he suggests that birds could navigate the North American continent by listening to the infrasounds of the Atlantic waves crashing on the coast.
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And the volcanic rumblings of volcanoes in South America and even like the wind blowing through the Rockies.
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So that there's these, the earth offers us these sounds that we can navigate with and the birds are tuned.
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They've been doing it for millennia.
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So that is very inspiring to think about how we can use the body or our senses to calibrate and tune to the environments that we're in.
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So we thought about sound that way, sight, smell, touch even, like feeling the wind, knowing when it's a windy day, thinking about how birds in particular take advantage of the heat thermals that happen when the warm air hits the mountain so that you can watch, we all see vultures and hawks spiraling up.
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So this idea that a hawk can just catch that spiral and spiral for hours until they get to the top and then just glide hundreds of down to the next spiral.
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So they find this effortless way of moving that may take more time and may not be direct, but it's actually the most efficient.
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So those kinds of things I found very fascinating and began to integrate into the choreography and the ways that we were moving.
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Does that answer the question of other questions?
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Yes.
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Yes.
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No, that did.
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It answered both of them.
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How does that, how does that inform you then also to how do you translate that experience into dance or into movement?
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One of the things that we're talking about efficiency.
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One of the things we did in each of our public events with Birdbrain is we would, most of the time we would start with a workshop for families.
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And we would draw on the kind of on spatial awareness exercises that humans have quite good spatial awareness, actually.
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So we'd have simple exercises a parent could do with their child of walking towards each other with closed eyes, just relying on our proprioceptive senses and changing speeds.
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We had another one where we think about what our origin was.
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We decide, you know, what place we were in, and then we go towards a destination and we go and direct straight lines.
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And then we try and remember those.
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For example, like ducks and geese, they learn their migration.
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It's like the culture of the geese.
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They teach it to their youngsters versus say ospreys who have genetic coding.
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The parents actually fly south before the young ones.
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The young ones get a little bit stronger and then they fly after and they just have a genetic map in their brain that lets them fly directly.
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This is really what they learned with the satellite tracking.
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Over the years, they start teaching each other like oh yeah if you come up to these mountains a little bit easier if we go through Central America we don't have to fly so far across the Gulf of Mexico these kinds of things but all that information from the scientists began to come into the dancing and we wanted to share that kind of embodied knowledge with the people that were coming to watch our performances so this other one yeah that you know going in direct lines or trying curving lines seeing how it changes our memory it changes our way of moving our experience of space So I wanted to offer the audience an opportunity to explore something in their own bodies.
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And we would often end with like what I called an orientation score, where we'd close our eyes and settle into our bodies.
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And then I'd ask people to, if we were going in the direction from north to south to face north, the direction the animals were going.
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And it was always so fascinating then to ask people, how did they know that was north?
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Some people were like, well, the ocean is to the west, or the mountains are to the east, or they had all these associations with place, or I followed my father, which is again like the ducks and geese do, or I have a map in my brain, or I have just an intuitive sense that this is north, or I was paying attention to the sun.
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So all these different navigational strategies would come into the group.
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And that was always really fun.
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And it's really changed.
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That bird brain was 20 years ago.
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And people have very different answers now because we're so used to navigating on a phone.
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Yes.
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I was about to say, it sounds a lot like needing a sense of awareness.
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Yes.
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A sense of awareness of time, a sense of awareness of place, being able to tune into your own physical being.
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And yes, I think that is something that as a collective, we do less and less now.
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Going inward and tuning into that, right?
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I'm just thinking, I wonder if I could do that.
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I'm going to keep wondering that.
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We're not going to dive into that right this second.
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But I actually came across your work through a Facebook group called Dance Professors Online.
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It was started during the middle of the pandemic.
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And now we share resources and a lot of encouragement.
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And someone had made a request for improvisation, information, exercises, tools, and your book of field guide to islanding came highly recommended.
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Oh, I'm so glad to hear that.
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Yes.
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And so if we could begin there with island, I say begin there, we've already begun.
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We're halfway in this now.
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But if you can take a second and really define island, you told us what it means, but really go into like the who, the what, the why.
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Okay.
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So as I mentioned, when I finished this project, I really wanted to offer other people this opportunity to collaborate with scientists.
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We started the iLab residency program in 2006.
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And we had an application process and people would apply for a project that would look at some particular aspect of New York City's ecology, like the feeding habits of cormorants or the watershed of East Tremont in the Bronx or the heat island effect or, oh, there are so many of them.
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And now I'm kind of, what other one could...
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There was one called Earth's Beach and something that was in Queens, a Corona Park that worked with a geneticist that was studying rat populations in Queens and Manhattan.
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Yeah, there were 13 or 14 different residencies that we did over like a five or six year period.
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And there was such a robust and compelling kind of research that was coming from each residency.
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And we always had a exchange that one residency would share their collaborative and collective process with the next.
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It was just beginning.
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And the new one would kind of exchange what their interests were.
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And we wanted to find a way to share that kind of this really exciting research method to a wider public.
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And we spent about three years working on this.
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We thought we'd have a website and we can have photos and videos and descriptions.
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And we had word ways of thinking about work.
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The words that would collect people's attention to one or the connections across residencies was really fascinating.
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But in the end, we decided that we would build this field guide so that one could take the field guide outside and it would have scores that are organized in these different ways by pronouns, by the prepositions, the number, the timeline, the chronological one, and then these words that had to do with whether Whether they were orientation scores or about creating publics or about, boy, I'm tired.
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I'm not remembering all that, but I love the way that we organized the book.
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Have it with me.
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I'm going to get it.
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But we felt that this notion of a score was a really wonderful way of sharing it with a wider public so that you can use the score in any way that you want that might apply to your work.
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to your particular questions.
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So they could, it's kind of this iterative strategy of engaging with how someone else thought about watersheds and bringing in your own ideas.
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They're kind of poetic.
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They're kind of instructional.
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They feel very invitational.
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And it's been amazing to use them over and over again for, which was like almost 10 years ago that we published this book.
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Wow.
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Am I answering your question?
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And then like three years ago, we translated it to Spanish.
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Yes.
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Now we're offering the workshops to recently arrived families in Spanish, and that's been so moving to give them or offer a situation for these families to connect to nature.
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They've often been on long journeys and then suddenly in the city and to share their own understandings of environment and nature and farming.
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And, you know, they bring so much experience.
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It's so valuable to share.
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Yeah.
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So yeah, I love this book so much, more and more every year.
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So my question for our audience is, can you define what a score is?
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Yes, this is a really good question.
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So many people ask that.
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So mostly I think the way we're most familiar with thinking of a score is a musical score.
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And there's actually a beautiful definition of a score in this book.
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I don't know if I have time to read it.
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But we think of it.
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Sure.
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Like a score, like with a score of music, you can send it from one group of musicians to another and they can replicate the music.
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And even like there's kind of a score is like a mark that you make on the ground if you're counting things.
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So it's a kind of gesture and an imprint or a kind of influence that one could draw on.
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In improvisational dance, I guess I would describe it as a set of instructions or parameters that are decided upon so that you can focus in on a particular set of ideas that you want to research.
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So there's an agreement that you'll all research them, but there's not necessarily a performance where there'll be a beginning and an end that has a conclusion.
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It's open to interpretation, open to exploring and expanding and experimenting, but it's very held by the conditions or the instructions or the parameters of each of these little scores.
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And some of them are quite open.
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There's one that's about latent potential.
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And I think it says something like, wait until it rains.
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After it rains, go out and look for mushrooms or something like this.
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It's very beautiful and poetic.
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And then some of them are much more concrete.
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So...
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Why this format, I guess, is the question.
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If we're talking about, I mean, there's also other scorings, like, you know, we've talked about Lama Notation slightly on this podcast so far.
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So yes, the scoring, creating the score, but the format that you used, the book, the resources, why was it important to share this information in this particular format?
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Well, I...
00:22:46.019 --> 00:22:51.665
Again, I think this format is an invitation.
00:22:51.665 --> 00:22:55.270
It asks others to come in and collaborate.
00:22:55.270 --> 00:22:59.257
Each one of the scores is built from a collaborative process.
00:22:59.257 --> 00:23:11.192
So the score allows for different ways of thinking or collaborative thinking that come from science, from dance, from music, from architecture, from urban planning.
00:23:11.192 --> 00:23:22.413
Activity of writing a score collaboratively helps bring in, they feel, They're like a frame that provides a kind of openness.
00:23:22.413 --> 00:23:25.516
I think that I keep coming back to this word invitation.
00:23:25.516 --> 00:23:33.162
So that they don't prescribe you have to do it this way or this is what we learn doing this.
00:23:33.162 --> 00:23:45.573
But they suggest if you're interested in orientation or navigation or tuning or duration, you can look through this book.
00:23:45.573 --> 00:23:48.055
You can find a bunch of scores.
00:23:48.055 --> 00:23:51.150
You can select one that interests you, you can try it out.
00:23:51.150 --> 00:24:01.712
You get other ideas, you can build your own score, you can mix scores, you can read them as poetry, you can invite other people to do them with you.
00:24:01.712 --> 00:24:12.603
So they're kind of an invitation to research that allows for this kind of interdisciplinary kinds of knowing.
00:24:14.684 --> 00:24:22.151
Yeah, I mean, it really sounds like an extension of community and an extension of the collaboration that you're talking about of this collective of people.
00:24:22.151 --> 00:24:34.653
And I'm curious, have you had the extended collective use these scores and respond back to you to see how it's being developed and how it's continuing to grow?
00:24:34.653 --> 00:24:34.693
I
00:24:34.713 --> 00:24:47.335
have spoken to many people who use them in their teaching and I'm trying to think.
00:24:47.335 --> 00:24:50.660
Right now I'm not thinking of any specific examples.
00:24:50.660 --> 00:24:55.027
I know I've had them of people saying what they've grown into.
00:24:55.027 --> 00:24:58.613
Like for example, there was like a 24-hour score.
00:24:58.613 --> 00:25:03.922
A lot of people have talked about how they've used that and transitioned into their practice in different ways.
00:25:06.286 --> 00:25:06.365
Yeah.
00:25:06.882 --> 00:25:11.692
The orientation score has been used, you know, was used to think about how birds migrate.
00:25:11.692 --> 00:25:16.622
We're using it here in New Mexico to think about the movement of toxicity.
00:25:16.622 --> 00:25:22.954
So what's upwind, downwind, what's upriver, downriver, how toxicity filters through.
00:25:22.954 --> 00:25:44.413
I've, in my own teaching, I teach with a professor in urban planning in Champaign-Urbana, and the students design, one of their assignments is to create scores, and we were bringing in a very sort of feminist approach.
00:25:44.413 --> 00:25:59.038
decolonial perspective and the students came up with really wonderful scores that I never would have thought of that yeah brought us into our bodies to understand the concepts they were working with I was really moved by that
00:25:59.058 --> 00:26:08.375
so What you just said there is the scores brought us into our bodies.
00:26:08.375 --> 00:26:12.299
And what does that embodiment do?
00:26:12.299 --> 00:26:15.785
Dance is known as an embodied practice.
00:26:15.785 --> 00:26:25.117
I guess my question is, how does that enhance the work, the person, the process?
00:26:25.157 --> 00:26:29.644
In my own experience, I'm working with people outside.
00:26:29.644 --> 00:26:33.147
There's a way that dancing outside...
00:26:33.147 --> 00:26:40.645
really in relationship to the environment, to the systems that we're working with.
00:26:40.645 --> 00:26:45.691
You know, it's one thing to walk, even walk or bike through a landscape.
00:26:45.691 --> 00:27:13.175
But when you're moving at the same rate as leaves or you're feeling the flow of the water or you're crawling on the ground or tumbling like a tumbleweed or feeling the flow of your blood with the flow of the xylem and phloem of a tree or feeling the wind Thank you so much.
00:27:13.175 --> 00:27:44.769
from the intelligence of the body and the spirit and the sort of energetic experience that like how we even ask questions might change.
00:27:44.769 --> 00:27:53.078
There's a kind of cellular shifting that I feel like happens that makes us more attuned, more caring.
00:27:53.078 --> 00:28:01.488
You know, we don't step on bugs as much or, you know, like we're more careful about how we treat the world, how we treat each other.
00:28:01.488 --> 00:28:10.818
It's, you know, it's a real access to a liveliness and thriving through dancing that I just think is very powerful.
00:28:10.818 --> 00:28:14.703
And I see that in other people.
00:28:14.703 --> 00:28:28.702
Like I see this kind of calm, this joy, the strength that dance builds, what it means to practice and be in your body over and over again in different environments, in different kinds of time.
00:28:28.702 --> 00:28:31.006
Yeah.
00:28:32.001 --> 00:28:32.321
Yeah.
00:28:32.321 --> 00:28:42.671
Again, it goes back to that word awareness, awareness of the whole person paradigm, bringing the whole person forward.
00:28:42.671 --> 00:28:50.097
Like you were giving the example of walking or riding your bike through an environment that to me is more of a, it's a physical activity.
00:28:50.097 --> 00:28:51.739
I'm moving through this environment.
00:28:51.739 --> 00:28:56.623
And so I'm not really sure we're bringing that whole person into that moment.
00:28:56.623 --> 00:29:01.968
But what you're talking about is connecting with what's actually there and being in that present now.
00:29:01.968 --> 00:29:12.221
It just brings back to a greater sense of awareness, I think on a level that most people are seeking, but I'm not really sure that...
00:29:12.221 --> 00:29:14.250
We get there.
00:29:14.250 --> 00:29:16.271
I'm not really sure I've gotten there.
00:29:16.271 --> 00:29:35.788
Listening to you explain this, I mean, I try to have a mindfulness practice, but I'm not really sure now that I have been able to get to the level that you're talking about as far as being outside in the environment with what's there, with what lives there.
00:29:35.788 --> 00:29:41.713
And it's just thought-provoking on have I reached that level as a person yet?
00:29:41.713 --> 00:29:45.117
And if not, then what are the ways that I can?
00:29:45.117 --> 00:29:47.840
So that's really impactful.
00:29:47.840 --> 00:29:49.883
You mentioned your current research.
00:29:49.883 --> 00:29:51.744
I believe it is called Move Thing.
00:29:51.744 --> 00:29:52.705
Yeah.
00:29:52.705 --> 00:29:52.965
Yeah.
00:29:52.965 --> 00:29:54.047
Yeah.
00:29:54.047 --> 00:29:59.212
And this is centered in South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
00:29:59.212 --> 00:30:03.897
Can you tell us a little bit more about this project and its particular scope?
00:30:05.980 --> 00:30:06.721
Yes.
00:30:06.721 --> 00:30:15.636
When I realized that it had been 20 years since I'd done the burn brain migration and I'm like I'm turning...
00:30:15.636 --> 00:30:16.982
I'm 64.
00:30:16.982 --> 00:30:17.424
And...
00:30:17.424 --> 00:30:32.531
I really would want to do another project that's as immersive and in-depth and sort of powerful as Birdbrain was, as transformative.
00:30:32.531 --> 00:30:36.315
What kind of project would that be now?
00:30:36.315 --> 00:30:45.222
The world has changed so much in 20 years, especially my understanding and my relationship to the environment.
00:30:45.222 --> 00:30:51.608
So I was like, what could it be?
00:30:51.608 --> 00:30:52.368
What a good thought about it.
00:30:52.368 --> 00:30:52.750
I thought about it.
00:30:52.750 --> 00:30:52.970
Okay.
00:30:52.970 --> 00:31:15.574
I'm going to follow the movement of toxicity, something that's made by humans that is still very involved with like weather, atmosphere, energy, and very, very much a part of resource extraction and imagining that the earth is something that humans can use to their own advantage and not really a deep relationship.
00:31:15.574 --> 00:31:29.409
So I was looking for super fun sites and I noticed that, you uranium mines when we were developing uranium for both for power and for nuclear war.
00:31:29.409 --> 00:31:33.292
And many of them were super fun sites.
00:31:33.292 --> 00:31:36.316
So I picked one in New Mexico.
00:31:36.316 --> 00:31:39.579
That's how I made myself to Albuquerque, made my way to Albuquerque.
00:31:39.579 --> 00:31:50.351
And I decided I went to do some dance research at the Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge, which is an amazing place.
00:31:50.351 --> 00:31:55.977
It's the first of its It's kind, has a real focus on environmental justice until our new president came into power.
00:31:55.977 --> 00:31:58.319
And it's very driven by the community.
00:31:58.319 --> 00:32:06.428
And the people in the South Valley have been overly impacted by all kinds of industry recycling.
00:32:06.428 --> 00:32:08.289
Their well water has been poisoned.
00:32:08.289 --> 00:32:09.692
Their air is poisoned.
00:32:09.692 --> 00:32:10.952
And they really fight back.
00:32:10.952 --> 00:32:20.683
And they've made this huge effort to bring the Bayou National Wildlife Refuge to restore that land and to insist that these industries clean up their act.
00:32:20.683 --> 00:32:22.746
and are responsible to the community.
00:32:22.746 --> 00:32:27.810
It's a small agricultural community just in the edge of the city of Albuquerque.
00:32:27.810 --> 00:32:34.519
And I met a wonderful organization called Los Jardines Institute who's been doing this work for decades.
00:32:34.519 --> 00:32:37.662
And so I've been partnering with them and Valle de Oro.
00:32:37.662 --> 00:32:45.490
And this year, last year we did something in the Environmental Justice Day at Valle de Oro and at Los Jardines.
00:32:45.490 --> 00:33:06.132
And this year we're working with Los Jardines and we're working with nine young people and they come dance with us every day and we also do restoration work in the bosque and we work on the farm and we did a toxic tour so they learn a lot about what's going on and a lot about the activism and the healing that's going on.
00:33:06.132 --> 00:33:12.739
And then through all these field trips and dancing, we develop a dance together that then we share with the public.
00:33:12.739 --> 00:33:16.663
We also create some scores and some games that come from our research.
00:33:16.663 --> 00:33:27.056
Yeah, so we're going to be offering this public event with performance And we'll feed everyone a meal of tamales from a local tamale maker.
00:33:27.056 --> 00:33:29.118
And yeah, that's happening on Saturday.
00:33:29.118 --> 00:33:36.308
So we make a zine that has young people's drawings and poetry and language about everything they've learned.
00:33:36.308 --> 00:33:37.810
So we've been very busy.
00:33:37.810 --> 00:33:39.012
It's very, very exciting.
00:33:39.012 --> 00:33:40.434
I'm just thrilled to be doing it.
00:33:41.195 --> 00:33:43.259
I was about to say, you're in it right now.
00:33:43.259 --> 00:33:44.980
You are in this process.
00:33:46.561 --> 00:33:56.451
And we're also doing a part of this with another fantastic organization, El Puente, which is a social and environmental justice organization that's been around for 40 years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
00:33:56.451 --> 00:34:03.777
And it turns out that Williamsburg, this part of Brooklyn in particular, has a very high air quality, poor air quality and air pollution.
00:34:03.777 --> 00:34:13.625
So we've been working there for three years slowly in this little park near the BQE doing sort of research performances twice a year.
00:34:13.625 --> 00:34:16.527
And we're building a performance from that research as well.
00:34:16.527 --> 00:34:18.014
Thank you.
00:34:18.273 --> 00:34:20.596
Yeah, so you've talked a little bit about this.
00:34:20.596 --> 00:34:28.882
Can you walk me through what this full-scale research project includes from preparation?
00:34:28.882 --> 00:34:42.094
Like you're in Albuquerque, New Mexico now, and you'll be there on location, you said for approximately two weeks, but I'm presuming that there was a lot of prep work that goes into this before you ever actually get to this site.
00:34:42.094 --> 00:34:45.898
You have a lot of moving parts and a lot of community partners.
00:34:45.898 --> 00:34:53.755
So can you kind of take us through what that project looks like from preparation to performance?
00:34:57.724 --> 00:35:00.934
Like I said, it starts with sort of identifying the...
00:35:00.934 --> 00:35:38.840
the location of the toxicity and then like so doing a lot of research about superfund sites i had learned a lot about how the government addresses this and then learning so much from how the activists are responding to that uh it's been the los jardines institute the co-founders are sofia martinez and richard moore and they have been doing this work since the 90s they were part of the first environmental justice conference of people of color in D.C.
00:35:38.840 --> 00:36:07.751
And so hearing their stories and hearing about their activism and then working with the scientists at Valle de Oro, the biologists there, and learning about how they're doing the restoration of the bosque there and the kind of legal requirements with water rights and this really using traditional ecological knowledge to recreate the kind of healthy systems that were once kept the bosque landscape or ecosystem alive, because it's been so...
00:36:07.751 --> 00:36:14.646
Straightened out and narrowed and controlled through the years with development of the city.
00:36:14.646 --> 00:36:33.242
So there's a lot of sort of that kind of all around information and then working with Los Sardinas to identify school groups that they're working with to find the young people south of Albuquerque, Islas de Pueblo.
00:36:33.242 --> 00:36:35.784
And they've done a lot of activism also.
00:36:35.784 --> 00:36:40.047
So learning about the Pueblo culture and their relationship to the land.
00:36:40.047 --> 00:36:51.679
because we are on the land of the Tiwa people and understanding the indigenous ways of, or doing my best to understand the indigenous ways of knowing and stewarding the land.
00:36:51.679 --> 00:36:59.889
We were here last year for a month and we camped at the, we had a trailer and we camped at the volunteer site for the refuge.
00:36:59.889 --> 00:37:06.036
So living on the land for a month was really impactful and we did a lot of volunteer work for the refuge.
00:37:06.036 --> 00:37:14.623
And then there's a lot of fundraising that happens But mostly it's really like hanging out, listening, following.
00:37:14.623 --> 00:37:22.331
Like what I learned about toxicity, you know, it's very diffuse and it kind of moves around, takes advantage and like follows the flow.
00:37:22.331 --> 00:37:28.936
So I really tried to follow the flow of energy and connection with people in place through the project.
00:37:28.936 --> 00:37:34.621
And maybe that's different than other ways where I felt more like, oh, I've got to make something happen.
00:37:34.621 --> 00:37:39.065
So that's been very powerful and I think built stronger relationships.
00:37:40.929 --> 00:37:44.715
What is your, we'll say, post-production?
00:37:44.715 --> 00:37:54.646
We have this experience, we have the performative experience, and then we move on to the next project.
00:37:54.646 --> 00:38:01.554
But what is the overall goal with each of these projects that you do?
00:38:01.554 --> 00:38:08.202
What are you hoping that the, not just the audience, but the collective receives from them?
00:38:10.849 --> 00:38:40.697
Well, I hope that the That the audience, this notion of awareness, of the power of community action, of relationship building, can help us have the strength to continue to have a voice and make change for the way we want our communities and neighborhoods to become healthy or thriving or continue to be that way.
00:38:40.697 --> 00:38:43.521
And maybe even on a larger scale to...
00:38:43.521 --> 00:39:06.945
be more attentive and not only attentive but actually change policy we can yeah so we can have a world that we can live in yeah And I've been thinking, you know, I really inspired by the field guide.
00:39:06.945 --> 00:39:15.092
And when I started working on this project, I was thinking, oh, maybe we can make a handbook for living with toxicity out of this one.
00:39:15.092 --> 00:39:20.297
And I've been, I have a collaborator working with me here now, Alex Fertetti-Arturo.
00:39:20.297 --> 00:39:25.862
She's, they're Colombian and they're doing a PhD in performance studies at Hunter.
00:39:25.862 --> 00:39:29.364
And they're, they're been really good at working on the zines.
00:39:29.364 --> 00:39:30.585
They really, it's their idea.
00:39:30.585 --> 00:39:43.266
And they've been really like, so that That's been really inspiring me to see the way image and text and the shape even of a book and create something that is like a little archive or documentation.
00:39:43.266 --> 00:39:45.451
They're very interested in archiving.
00:39:45.451 --> 00:39:48.436
So they've been looking back at my old archives, which is really interesting.
00:39:48.436 --> 00:39:51.882
So I have a hard time thinking about archives, but...
00:39:54.657 --> 00:40:01.751
Well, right now, I feel like there is a push or an energy behind archiving in the dance industry.
00:40:01.751 --> 00:40:11.467
Recently, there are new grants being established for the sole purpose of archiving dance and archiving what it is that we've been doing.
00:40:11.467 --> 00:40:15.876
Is that something that is important in your process?
00:40:18.114 --> 00:40:23.842
Yes, but I'm really trying to move because my work is not production based.
00:40:23.842 --> 00:40:26.045
It's process based.
00:40:26.045 --> 00:40:29.572
So I really think of this field guide as a real like archive.
00:40:29.572 --> 00:40:32.115
It's a collective archive.
00:40:32.115 --> 00:40:33.358
It's a community archive.
00:40:33.358 --> 00:40:36.222
Yeah.
00:40:36.222 --> 00:40:44.492
So I'm trying to think of a multidimensional way of archiving because I've never felt that satisfied with a video.
00:40:44.492 --> 00:40:52.559
I don't do big productions with a lot of fancy technological lighting and costume and this kind of thing.
00:40:52.559 --> 00:40:59.646
Sometimes I do theatrical performances, and I'm interested in that kind of thing.
00:40:59.646 --> 00:41:03.409
But I feel like the archive is more like you're saying.
00:41:03.409 --> 00:41:36.463
It's kind of this network of connections and relationships and the way influencing like these young people who are working with me now they're the archive you know they'll go out in the world and share friends and I'm I think because I'm so invested in improvisation like that I don't have such a but then you know when I do see old works or looking at this work that Alex is bringing back to me I'm so moved to see pieces or collaborations I did with other people and it's so I do totally believe in the archive so it's something I have to get over
00:41:36.463 --> 00:41:38.788
There's a lot of things in our life that we...
00:41:38.788 --> 00:41:40.070
It's a balancing act.
00:41:40.070 --> 00:41:40.911
Yeah.
00:41:40.911 --> 00:41:41.713
Absolutely, yes.
00:41:41.713 --> 00:41:52.715
So in season one, we are really focused on the idea of resilience and dance's role in empowering a sense of resilience.
00:41:52.715 --> 00:41:56.322
How would you say that the work you're doing is...
00:41:56.322 --> 00:42:04.684
adding to that energy or force behind establishing a sense of resilience?
00:42:10.918 --> 00:42:14.226
I think the work is resilient in that it...
00:42:14.226 --> 00:42:30.059
It feels like even the movement of it, you know, because we're moving with this very hard to deal with notion of toxicity, it can feel quite harsh and...
00:42:30.059 --> 00:43:07.208
like you know it's poisonous there's a like the sense of flow or moving around it that of meeting something listening to its impact inviting curiosity through movement like movement is always can adjust and change and shift and move around we've been working with someone who teaches us capoeira in the morning so there's this notion of like flowing with it's not aggressive it's more like finding the energy of flowing with.
00:43:07.208 --> 00:43:13.494
And dance has always offered me, there's always another possibility for movement.
00:43:13.494 --> 00:43:16.797
There's always another place of initiating.
00:43:16.797 --> 00:43:30.452
There's always another, even if it's internal, there's some way of shifting or changing or adapting to find a way to change or thrive or extend.
00:43:30.452 --> 00:43:49.630
So that feels really resilient to be able to move into extremes and out of the extremes without feeling the limitations of a spot, but being able to see possibilities and potential from whatever angle you're approaching it.
00:43:53.396 --> 00:43:54.077
Yeah.
00:43:54.077 --> 00:43:57.161
being able to, I appreciate it.
00:43:57.161 --> 00:44:04.409
I appreciate that because I've been looking at resilience as almost a result.
00:44:04.409 --> 00:44:21.851
And what I mean by that is defining resilience as forward motion or being able to move through something or being able to bounce back from something that there is an arc of some kind and that the resilience is...
00:44:21.851 --> 00:44:26.112
for lack of better words, a product.
00:44:26.112 --> 00:44:40.204
And so the way that I interpreted your description is that it is the moment itself versus getting to the other side.
00:44:40.204 --> 00:44:49.371
It's being in it and being able to maintain that sense of awareness, maintain that sense of groundedness in that moment.
00:44:49.371 --> 00:44:52.173
And thank you for that perspective.
00:44:53.295 --> 00:44:54.255
You're very welcome.
00:44:54.255 --> 00:44:54.795
Cause I
00:44:54.956 --> 00:44:55.336
haven't, I
00:44:57.038 --> 00:44:57.579
mean.
00:44:59.880 --> 00:45:00.141
Yeah.
00:45:00.141 --> 00:45:04.985
And I'm just now recognizing that I was seeing resilience as almost a product.
00:45:04.985 --> 00:45:12.172
I had not realized that that's the way that I was looking at it versus something that is ever changing, ever flowing.
00:45:12.172 --> 00:45:22.581
And we're just manipulating, not really manipulating because manipulating I think is, is still too much of a forward motion push of energy, but an allowance.
00:45:24.141 --> 00:45:24.222
Yeah.
00:45:24.418 --> 00:45:25.139
and allowance.
00:45:25.139 --> 00:45:27.320
Thank you for that.
00:45:27.320 --> 00:45:34.708
Thank you so much for bringing your research and methodologies to us today.
00:45:34.708 --> 00:45:41.197
We do have one final task with our time together, and that is our rapid round.
00:45:41.197 --> 00:45:47.784
And so if you could complete the following two sentences for me, starting with the first one.
00:45:47.784 --> 00:45:49.025
Resilience is...
00:45:49.025 --> 00:45:50.746
Opening.
00:45:50.746 --> 00:45:55.887
And number two, dance has taught me.
00:45:55.887 --> 00:45:59.385
To be part of the world.
00:45:59.385 --> 00:46:03.771
Thank you for that.
00:46:03.771 --> 00:46:06.893
And I really appreciate that I can hear the birds.
00:46:09.516 --> 00:46:12.117
I have little house sparrows and some house finches.
00:46:12.117 --> 00:46:14.039
Sometimes there's a robin.
00:46:14.039 --> 00:46:18.643
I'm a big bird watcher as you could since I obviously became a bird.
00:46:18.643 --> 00:46:19.003
Why not?
00:46:19.003 --> 00:46:20.144
I love bird watching.
00:46:20.144 --> 00:46:21.445
I know really good bird watchers.
00:46:21.445 --> 00:46:22.786
I'm not a good one, but I love it.
00:46:24.047 --> 00:46:27.451
Yes, I just feel as if they added to the experience.
00:46:27.451 --> 00:46:30.833
So I hope they're not erased in post-production.
00:46:30.833 --> 00:46:31.914
Me too.
00:46:31.914 --> 00:46:37.902
But Jennifer, I Again, thank you so much for bringing this information and research.
00:46:37.902 --> 00:46:46.353
And I hope that the audience is able to see themselves in the moment and find those moments of awareness and groundedness through their movement.
00:46:47.775 --> 00:46:48.655
Thank you, Amy.
00:46:48.655 --> 00:46:53.242
It's been really a joy to talk with you and your provocative and caring questions.
00:46:53.242 --> 00:46:54.342
I really appreciate it.
00:46:55.585 --> 00:46:56.525
Yeah, thank you.
00:46:56.525 --> 00:47:04.418
Jennifer Monson has literally shifted the way I see myself as a part of the ecosystem and the importance of awareness.
00:47:04.418 --> 00:47:14.630
I often talk about understanding my role as a part of the whole, and Jennifer is doing just that and inviting others to join her in many ways.
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You can find details and links to Jennifer and her work in the show notes.
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You could have chosen any other platform, but you chose us and you chose dance.
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And for that, we are incredibly thankful.
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A special thank you goes out to the Lamar University Center for Resiliency for making season one possible.
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Dance Unscripted is presented by Aimed Dance.