Dancing Earth returns to Durango with “seeds: REdGENERATION”
Durango, CO – The Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College welcomes the return of the nation’s premier indigenous contemporary dance collective Dancing Earth, performing its new, original work “seeds: REdGENERATION” at the hall on Friday, Sept. 9, 2016, 7:30 p.m.
The performance supports the Imagine Your Parks Project, honoring the living legacy, land, and the original peoples of Mesa Verde National Park and the Four Corners Region during this centennial year celebration of America’s National Parks.
Dancing Earth embodies a mission to revitalize bio-cultural diversity through artistic expression. Founded in 2004 by artistic director Rulan Tangen, Dancing Earth is a constellation of inter-tribal dancers, composers, costumers, filmmakers, and spoken word artists who insist on the contemporary relevance of ancestral ways of being, knowing, and doing.
“As such, our ‘seeds: REdGENERATION’ performance project follows the calling by Native Elders to create a cycle of dance works throughout indigenous territories worldwide to regenerate the health of our planet by embodying indigenous perspectives on water, seeds, plants, and all relations,” said Tangen.
Evolving from a body of work with ecological focus that included a production called “SEED” made with students of the Fort Lewis College Theater Department, Dancing Earth “seeds: REdGENERATION” was organically grown from exchanges with Native Elders in community visioning sessions and movement workshops throughout the region.
“Dancing Earth is honored to bring this dance work to the Four Corners region, where we will share our immersive creative process with the local community – including the First Nations peoples of the territory,” said Tangen. “Every movement, song, gift, sacred site, and meal shared has contributed to the culminating performance, a transformative dance-ritual that embodies the living earth and is created with and for the land and its beings. Together, we will dance for our lives, envisioning and embodying vital futures for all earth inhabitants.”
The performers gather as individual artists to create experimental yet elemental dances that reflect their rich cultural heritage and explore identity as contemporary Native peoples. Dancing Earth is passionately committed to indigenous contemporary dance as primal, yet articulate, movement – blood memory in motion – that speaks to all beings and illuminates issues of cultural, historical, philosophical, mythic and spiritual relevance.
Tangen, who cultivates the indigenous creative team, brings some 30 years of international professional experience in powwow, ballet, modern dance, circus arts, film, theater and education to the collective.
The company made history by being the first indigenous contemporary dance ensemble to be awarded the prestigious National Dance Project grant to support the development of its program, “Of Bodies of Elements.” The cardinal themes were integrated into a semester course project led by Tangen at Stanford University, as a creative response to “Race and Environment” hosted by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts.
In 2010, Dancing Earth was recognized with an award for Expressive Arts from the National Museum of the American Indian. Most recently, Tangen was selected as a top 10 finalist for the Nathan Cummings Fellowship for Social Change and received the Arts and Social Change Award from Arts and Healing Network.
Since 2004, Dancing Earth has performed throughout the world, most recently representing the U.S. at the RIDDU RIDDU Festival in Norway in summer 2016.
The company has included in its history more than 30 performance artists representing as many First Nations. Performing in “REdGENERATION,” in addition to Tangen, is Natalie Bennally, a theatre graduate with a drama teaching accreditation from Fort Lewis College who works with Navajo youth from the Four Corners area in performing arts. A Dine language speaker, she was featured as the voice of Dorrie in the Navajo version of Disney’s Finding Nemo. She hopes to one day create an after-school performing arts program that encourages arts and cultural identity on the reservation.
Also featured is Anne Pesata, a Jicarilla Apache from Dulce, N.M. who studied at Fort Lewis College, but has returned home to her reservation to work as a community health representative with the Jicarilla Community Health and Fitness Center, as well as maintain her heritage as basket weaver and cultural carrier.
Rounding out the troupe is Lupita Salazar who hails from the high desert mountains of northern New Mexico, raised on her family’s ranch before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Returning to the ranch following her grandfather’s passing, she discovered her passion for the land and the traditions of her ancestors – passions that inspire her today both in life and in performance art. She passes on her heritage to regional youth through Moving Arts Espanola.
Dancing Earth has been recognized as “One of the Top 25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine for its distinctive performance rituals, which offer a powerful physicality rooted in inter-tribal cultural philosophies and aesthetics. View video samplings of Dancing Earth’s earlier works at http://www.dancingearth.org/video.
Tickets for Dancing Earth ($25/$35) are available on-line at www.durangoconcerts.com, or call 970.247.7657, or visit the Ticket Office inside the Durango Welcome Center at 8th St. and Main Ave., Downtown Durango. Ticket Office hours are Monday – Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
The Community Concert Hall is a not-for-profit, multi-use performance venue located on the campus of Fort Lewis College. Its ability to bring a diverse spectrum of shows to Southwest Colorado is made possible through a partnership with the college, a state-supported, independent institution of higher education, and through financial and in-kind contributions from generous members of the community.
