INSTINCT Dance Festival

Critical Response Showcase Series

 

January 8th-11th

6 - 7:30pm

Doors open 5:45pm

 

Main Street Landing Black Box Theater

60 Lake Street, Burlington VT
 

$20 cash/check/venmo/paypal at the door

 

ABOUT:
The Instinct Dance Festival is partially funded by a “Community Fund” grant from Burlington City Arts, to support ANIMAL Dance to bring public presentations of dance works-in-progress with facilitated conversations to the public. Using Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, ANIMAL Dance Director Hanna Satterlee will guide the audience through a structured feedback session to appropriately yet courageously support an artist while in process with new work. Come see dance pieces that are in development, and be moved in new and dynamic ways through the power of dance and discourse! Each evening showcase welcomes any audience member who wishes to join the conversation; whether as a witness or as a participant. Join us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Monday January 8th
“Rewilding The Body”
By Anna Riley-Shepard with Lana Harris (Sound)

Dramaturg: Skip Rosamilia; Visual Designer: Mo Ghandour

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Rewilding The Body begins, of course, with wildness — the idea of it, the space it occupies in the human mind. People travel to wild places seeking to “reconnect with nature”, to be faced with landscapes so “other”, so magnificent and unknown, as to be shocked into feeling alive. But humans, like any animal, are natural. We ourselves are nature. Moreover, most of the landscapes we consider ‘wild, ‘untouched’, or ‘pristine’ are not so at all, having existed in sustainable symbiosis with human stewardship for thousands of years. Still, the feelings evoked by these landscapes are strong, they open a sense of loss so deep we’ve forgotten it’s there. It is something within us that wild nature triggers, an inner wilderness. But what is ‘wild’ exactly? A renunciation of control? Identity beyond categorization? A return to instinct? And what is wildness today? Can reinhabiting it in the here and now help break the mold of colonial extraction, in which ‘wild’ framed a racial otherness and inexhaustible natural world against which to define civilization and progress? This piece — a trio for a dancing body, a live sound set, and projections — is a question: can we rewild the body? But it is also a proposal and declaration: yes, we can, we must, like our lives depended on it – because they do. It is a letting go, but also a coming home.

 

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Tuesday January 9th
“Subject To Change”
By Julian Barnett and Jocelyn Tobias. With Alex Cobb, C Green, Chong Ho Kim, and Hanna Satterlee

Sound: Alexander Pro; Dramaturgical Support: Leila Rose Teitelman

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Subject To Change is a work that explores the feelings of precipice and instability within our climate crisis. Part performance, part meditation, the project will integrate an intergenerational gathering of performers to question the implications of oscillating at a time of urgency and collective projections of futurity.

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Wednesday January 10th
“Precarity”
Choreography and Performance by Nicole Dagesse, Jessie Owens, and Danielle Tekut

 

As you traverse the Fool's Edge, where does the fear and thrill live in the body? Enter the liminality of the edge, where nothing is certain, and anything is possible. Text, movement, and textile will weave through the dancers and audience in an immersive and collaborative unfurling.

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Thursday January 11th
“Ghost”
By Jessie Owens & Matt LaRocca

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“I think it’s always been easier for you when I am far away,” he said, just before I never saw him again. “No,” I replied, “It’s always been easier for you.” When he visits me in my dreams I am only ever just speaking about him. He is never actually there. “He haunts you.” Yes. Meet me in that liminal space between the tactile and spirit worlds, in the space of metaphor and meaning-making, of conjuring and daydreaming, of dance and ritual, far beyond the state of trance, where time and place and memory and creation blend. Could I dance my body hard enough to dislodge you from the ethers just for this one brief encounter? Or hard enough to blur the lines of my own skin and bones, turn myself to vapor and find you where you so restlessly linger? So you can look me in the face once more—the face of your child. The child whose eyes you could not meet when you dwelled among the living. Ghost— look at me. We have unfinished business.

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INSTINCT Dance Festival

OPEN Floor 

Community Mixer 

 

Friday

January 12th

6-7:30pm

Doors open 5:45pm

 

Main Street Landing Black Box Theater

60 Lake Street, Burlington VT
 

$20 or Pay What You Can

cash/check/venmo/paypal at the door

 

On Friday January 12th, come share or witness excerpts of performance art by members of the INSTINCT Festival community! We know the talent in our community far expands those who are offering workshops/trainings/performances throughout the scheduled week. Open Floor takes the format of an Open Mic night, allowing 8 artists/artist groups that are participating in the festival up to 10 minutes to share their work! There is no facilitated feedback session following this performance, but artists+audience are invited to engage in conversation following the show at an off-site venue (to be announced day of) from 7:30pm onwards.

 

Wish to perform?

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All performers must sign up in advance at the INSTINCT Box Office table in the Lobby of Main Street Landing, between Monday and Thursday January 8-11th. Priority will be given to those who are participating in the festival activities. Space is limited to 8 artists/groups. All performers must be available to tech on Friday January 12th from 4:15-5:45pm.