E|MERGE 2014. photo maré hieronimus
cory neale. photo davi cohen
begin. photo maré hieronimus
adriana segurado
trailblazing
building bridges. photo cory neale
west cummington
buz. photo maré hieronimus
alex kramer
location scouting
west cummington congregational church
wccc
preparation. photo maré hieronimus
maré hieronimus
oracles
composing. photo maré hieronimus
soundscapes. photo maré hieronimus
installations
warmth & joy
Can we turn everything we have done thus far into source material? Can we find the underbelly and infuse it with meaning? Can we enter performance and connect with communities in a fully embodied way?
Can we explore the roots to shape the blossoms?
Can we shift, settle, and fuse with the space?
We have entered the woods, in body, and today in mind.
Where do we search for answers? How is purpose revealed? Can we build bridges with the land, our ancestry, our community, the unknown, and ourselves? Can we journey to find attentive awareness, empathetic presence, authentic connection, and profound discovery?
Can we cultivate love?
i will do my best to find gratitude in remembering love,
in giving love,
in receiving love,
and in loving love.
and i looked up
and you were close enough that i could witness your flight
that i could listen to your reasons
that i could read your dread
and i was stuck somewhere between silence and sentiment
and all i wanted were your arms to be the arms i remembered
but they weren't
they were someone else's hands.
- n. nigro (2014)
E|MERGE: Interdisciplinary Collaborative Residency is a two-week creative residency emphasizing collaboration across disciplines and innovative models for creative exchange.
E|MERGE moves beyond traditional residency models as scientists, cultural workers, and artists come together to share skills and resources, bridge known and unknown territories, and form lasting partnerships that weave a strong international network of creators.
We need your help to make this residential opportunity available to creators regardless of ability to pay. So far, we've raised $3,000. Help us raise the remaining $6,000 by March 2nd to provide 100% of need-based scholarship aid!
We can't do it without you! Donate today to champion truly exceptional artistry from 35 remarkable participants.
Thank you!
Nikki and The E|MERGE Curatorial Team
E|MERGE has been a partner program of Earthdance since 2010, vibrantly providing rare time and space to emerging and acclaimed creators alike for co-creation.
Earthdance | 252 Prospect St, Plainfield, MA 01070 | 413.634.5678 | www.earthdance.net
Earthdance receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council
and if we could just stand still for a moment we might be able to feel the awe.
The summer after I graduated from The School of Toronto Dance Theatre I found myself wandering the racks of a fancy shoe shop in Calgary, Alberta. I had just fled from an audition before I'd even been cut (self-doubt reared it's ugly head early) and was attempting to soothe my soul with a little retail distraction. My phone rang. It was the Grossman Company calling to say they wanted me to dance with them next season. I was so overwhelmed, I kept thinking they were inviting me to come and audition. The voice on the other line kept repeating, "No no, you have the job, you have the job." Needless to say I didn't buy any shoes that day.
Thank you Danny. Congratulations on 35 years.
After the Danny Grossman Dance Company’s 35 years in existence, with over 50 choreographic works to Danny Grossman’s name, the decision was made to fold the company in order to make way for a new chapter in Danny’s career as he continues to be active in the areas of preservation, licensing his work, coaching and creation.
Michael Richards, Chair of the Danny Grossman Dance Company, remarked: "With the understanding that these funds must be transferred from charity to charity, it is the wish of Danny and the Company’s Board of Directors that the endowment be transferred to Dance Collection Danse, Canada’s national dance archives and a registered charity. Since 1983, Dance Collection Danse has been active in the areas of dance archiving, publishing, education and research. They currently house the largest collection of Grossman dance archives. It is our hope that with this endowment, Dance Collection Danse will continue to prosper and assist senior dance artists such as Danny Grossman to realize their ambitions in terms of creating a dance legacy."
Responsible for determining where an endowment fund will be placed, the Ontario Arts Foundation Board of Directors was very pleased to support this request and to confirm the endowment being transferred to Dance Collection Danse.
Established in 1991 as a public foundation to encourage and facilitate private giving to the arts in Ontario, the Ontario Arts Foundation is a non-governmental foundation and a registered charity. The Foundation holds over 300 endowments and funds established by individuals, private foundations, corporations and arts organizations. The Arts Endowment Fund is a program of the Government of Ontario, through the Ministry of Culture, administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation.
DCD wishes to acknowledge Helen Chapman, former Managing Director of the Grossman Company, and Alan Walker, Executive Director of the Ontario Arts Foundation, for their work in enabling this transition of funds.
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PHOTOGRAPHS
Danny Grossman in his work Curious Schools of Theatrical Dancing, 1977
Photo: Andrew Oxenham
Danny Grossman and Judith Hendin in Grossman's work Higher, 1975
Photo: Andrew Oxenham
Dance Collection Danse © 2014. All rights reserved.
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“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
Sometimes life surprises you in the most generous way, and you realise, that your favourite human being was by your side all along.
Happy Birthday Mama. Thank you for loving me.
Mikey.
Because addiction has touched me. Sat so close at my side, holding the hands of those I love.
Because we watch them disappear, slip away, transform like ghosts dying translucent deaths.
Because we can still see the beauty in their pained hearts and wish the rest of the world could too.
Because he once asked me if I knew what it meant to lose all goodness, because that is what addiction can do – it can steal your heart.
- n. nigro (2014)
please read
I still find it strange - human, beautiful, and necessary - but strange nonetheless that we can feel such earnest love for people we have never met. Philip Seymour Hoffman was my absolute favourite actor, my longest running crush, an artist with such depths of humanity that I sometimes found him unbearable to watch. I feel love, loss, sadness, admiration, and gratitude. I feel silly and selfish for these very feelings, as I cannot imagine the pain of those near and dear to him - my heart goes out.
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
"Every Friday afternoon Chase’s teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student whom they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.
And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, Chase’s teacher takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns.
Who is not getting requested by anyone else?
Who doesn’t even know who to request?
Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?
Who had a million friends last week and none this week?
You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down- right away- who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying.
As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children – I think that this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students. It is like mining for gold – the gold being those little ones who need a little help – who need adults to step in and TEACH them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to join a group, or how to share their gifts with others. And it’s a bully deterrent because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside of her eyeshot – and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share. But as she said – the truth comes out on those safe, private, little sheets of paper.
As Chase’s teacher explained this simple, ingenious idea – I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “How long have you been using this system?” I said.
Ever since Columbine, she said. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine.
Good Lord.
This brilliant woman watched Columbine knowing that ALL VIOLENCE BEGINS WITH DISCONNECTION. All outward violence begins as inner loneliness. She watched that tragedy KNOWING that children who aren’t being noticed will eventually resort to being noticed by any means necessary.
And so she decided to start fighting violence early and often, and with the world within her reach. What Chase’s teacher is doing when she sits in her empty classroom studying those lists written with shaky 11 year old hands - is SAVING LIVES. I am convinced of it. She is saving lives.
And what this mathematician has learned while using this system is something she really already knew: that everything – even love, even belonging – has a pattern to it. And she finds those patterns through those lists – she breaks the codes of disconnection. And then she gets lonely kids the help they need. It’s math to her. It’s MATH.
All is love- even math. Amazing.
Chase’s teacher retires this year – after decades of saving lives. What a way to spend a life: looking for patterns of love and loneliness. Stepping in, every single day- and altering the trajectory of our world.
TEACH ON, WARRIORS. You are the first responders, the front line, the disconnection detectives, and the best and ONLY hope we’ve got for a better world. What you do in those classrooms when no one is watching- it’s our best hope.
Teachers- you’ve got a million parents behind you whispering together: “We don’t care about the damn standardized tests. We only care that you teach our children to be Brave and Kind. And we thank you. We thank you for saving lives.”
Love – All of Us"
Read more from this courageous loving Mama here.
My days at 15 were blanketed in the warmth of my north side home in Edmonton, Alberta - walls covered in Haida art shaping my definition of beauty, water rings on deep mahogany tables, an Ewok of a dog at the foot of our beds with the perfect underbite, my older brother pacing in the basement, and the compelling charm of my father, convincing me to take “mental health” days so we could stay home watching movies and listening to the Fine Young Cannibals. I had begun attending the only performing arts school in the city because I wanted to dance, leaving behind my soulmate-friend to this day, Jolene Metcalfe, and in turn discovering the beauty of Carmell Dermott-King and Karie Kohar-Gavin. I watched people shave heads over garbage cans, sat with Goths in math class, painted a small flower on my cheek, developed a crush on a boy who perpetually had a bloody nose and the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen. I spent most of my evenings on the floor of Edmonton Dance Centre in the company of such greats as Kate Garrett, Michelle Marie Santiago, Dana Robinson, Kyla Radomsky-Christie, Kristine Owen Wood and Becca Kilbride. I was scared a lot - that my dreams were too big and my dancing too small, that I did not possess boldness, that everything around me might fall apart, but I was hungry and enthralled with even a sliver of a chance that those steps might take me somewhere.
- n. nigro (2013)
I am honoured to call Gabriel Kelley my friend. He is soulful, kind, talented, and oh so human. Listen to his magic here.
photo: Gabriel Kelley
“When you start to really know someone, most of their physical characteristics vanish in your mind. You begin to dwell in their energy, recognize their scent, and appreciate their wit. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with physical beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, or want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and your body for a little while, but not your heart in the long-term. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, most physical imperfections become irrelevant.”
this is love
“And I don’t accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness”
“Scientists have discovered that the small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.”
