Green Energy Arts at Solar One
2009 Schedule
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Our Lady of Detritus
September 5-6 // 2-4 PM
September 12 / 5-7 PM
Choreographer Jill Sigman and composer Kristin Norderval bring their mobile, interactive installation-performance piece to Solar One. Passerby will be asked to contribute “confessions” about their physical and emotional trash. These recorded or written testimonials will then be incorporated into an instant sound/movement performance.
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Alice Farley Dance Theater
September 17-19 // 5-7 PM [Rain Date September 20th]
Alice Farley brings the fantastical riverwalk Hellgate Love Letter back to Stuyvesant Cove Park. See strange creatures, characters lost in time, star-crossed lovers dance on stilts and cavort through their imaginary landscape. With music by Peter Garland and text from the works of Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca. Come early for dance, stay late for film!
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Our Lady of Detritus is a collaborative performance project that deals with themes of waste, recycling, what we do with our junk, and how we feel about it. It has been conceived as a portable performance installation involving music, movement and visuals that will be performed in a truck, food cart, or sanitation vehicle. Our Lady of Detritus will travel from neighborhood to neighborhood in New York City.
Collaborative Team:
Jill Sigman (choreographer and performance artist based in New York City) www.thinkdance.org OR www.youtube.com/thinkdance
Kristin Norderval (composer/singer based in New York City and Oslo, Norway) www.norderval.org
Our Lady of Detritus develops out of Sigman’s dream of a completely portable dance work that carries its home on its back and Norderval’s longtime desire for a portable interactive sound studio that can process the voices of people who encounter it along the way. Sigman and Norderval have worked collaboratively on multiple projects since 2003. Ideas for the traveling collaboration grew out of Sigman’s site-specific movement explorations at an International Residency in Art and Ecology at the Guapamacátaro Hacienda in rural Michoacan, Mexico in July 2007. Encountering roadside altars and shrines, Sigman observed upon closer inspection that these sacred objects were often created from garbage and cast off items. In response, she began experimenting with a priestess/goddess figure that is dressed in trash and junk food and acts as a reminder of recycling and transcendence. The piece explores current environmental issues about trash disposal and recycling; political issues around greed, consumerism, and materialism; and spiritual questions about how mundane or ordinary objects can become otherworldly or immaterially valuable. It also refers to the tradition of the Virgin Marian Day Parades and the communication tactics employed by grassroots political campaigns of Latin America.
In Our Lady of Detritus, a truck or fast food cart outfitted for sound processing (and possibly video projection) will travel and make performance stops in diverse neighborhoods. At each stop, Sigman and Norderval will solicit “confessions” from passersby regarding their physical and emotional trash, either in recorded voice or writing or both. Immediately, the confessions will be “processed” in a live performance ritual inside the truck or cart. Enshrined in garbage and dressed in regalia of garbage, tinsel, and fluorescent junk foods, Sigman will perform an improvisational movement structure that takes in each confession and “transforms” it while Norderval will process the confessions in sound, electronically mixing the words of audience members with other thematically-related sound sources.
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Photo: Paul Weinschenk
Solar One kicked off its 2008 Green Energy Arts season with a performance of HellGate Love Letter * What I Remember, an imaginary landscape in dance to be created at the edge of the East River. A project of visual art and performance designed by Bessie Award winning choreographer, Alice Farley, with music by Peter Garland. Now HellGate returns to Solar One in an expanded vrsion for 2009.
This interactive performance will be a River Walk, a guided tour among the shadows and memories of the urban waterfront. A company of 20 combine dance, boats, puppetry, circus arts, and create characters transformed through illusion and sculptural costuming.
Performances will begin promptly at 6 PM at 20th Street and the East River, Friday May 23 and Saturday May 24. Rain Date is May 25.
The piece is a love letter to New Yorkers and the waterfront environment that has uniquely shaped our city. Inspired by the words of Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and dramatist who attended Columbia University during the Great Depression of 1929, and of Walt Whitman, the influential American poet who is widely considered the father of free verse, HellGate Love Letter * What I Remember weaves together poetry, waterfront history, dance spectacle and puppetry to create an intoxicating mixture of past and future memory. HellGate Love Letter takes its name from the old Dutch name for the East River Strait: “Hellegat”, meaning Bright Passage or, alternatively, Gate to Hell.
From Garcia Lorca’s Landscape of the Pissing Crowd (Nocturne of Battery Place) and Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne):
“They burn, these people who can piss around a moan…
Out in this World, no one sleeps. No one, no one. / No one Sleeps.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas come and bite the men who do not dream
Out in this World, no one sleeps. No one, no one. / No one Sleeps.”
From Whitman’s Manahatta and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry :
“City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!”
“…myself disintegrated, everyone disintegrated, yet part of the scheme.”
The tour will be led by Gallus Mag, the legendary bouncer from the Hole in the Wall Bar on Water Street circa 1869, and the Hudson River pirate, Sadie the Goat, infamous leader of the Charlton Street Gang. This production is being sponsored by Looking Glass Productions, Inc. and Solar One, with additional funds from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. This program is also made possible, in part, with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the New York City department of Cultural Affairs; and the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation.
“For me the province of dance is to speak that which cannot be spoken. Make the invisible, visible.” Alice Farley
Dance is our body’s shadow. It is inescapable, woven around the rhythm, the pattern, the gesture of every human social and sexual interchange. It is a language we can understand in our bones, at the base of our neck, in the small of our back. It is a tangible mystery, easily comprehensible yet not translatable. Dance must be a surprise again. Out of the theater and extended into new forms, sculpture, costumes, puppets, illusion, we build an amplified body, a poetic body, but still it dances.
ALICE FARLEY DANCE THEATER is a New York based company. The group has created performances for the World Financial Center Winter Garden, the Whitney Museum, Smithsonian Museum, Cooper Hewitt Museum, Lincoln Center Plaza, Grand Central Terminal, La Mama Theater, The Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater at the Public Theater (in New York), at the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Bronx Zoo, Cleveland Science Center, the Singapore Arts Festival, Queen Sirikit Pavilion Bangkok, Aruba International Dance Festival, Toronto Harbourfront Festival, Quebec Festival D’Ete, Juste Pour Rire Montreal, Int. Contemporary Arts Festival Tokyo – among many others.
Collaborations with new music composers include Henry Threadgill, Dean Drummond (Harry Partch Ensemble), Mikel Rouse, and Peter Garland (Conquest of Mexico for New Music America).
This program is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
