the NETWORK project: A Dialogue on Building Resilience in our Nature Bodies

In-person and streaming tickets available. Registration is required; in-person space is limited. Registration closes 30 minutes prior to the start of the event. Masks recommended.

An embodied dialogue about nature, humans, and our interconnection. The panelists include Theresa Harlan, Ken Otter, Diane Butler, and Claire Peaslee, with a movement score offered from Jennifer Monson/iLAND. The dialogue will be moderated by Krista DeNio, Artistic Director of MovingGround.

the NETWORK project, created by MovingGround, is inspired by ecological systems of communication, resource-sharing, and survival employed in tree communities, to develop tools for resilient community building. Considering the ongoing climate crisis, how can all beings–trees, land, animals, and humans–survive and thrive together?

This conversation will bring together local and non-local experts who have sustained relationships with researching and learning together with the natural world, through embodied work and practices. Our conversation will include questions like: How are we in relationship with the land where we live now and where we originated? How do we connect or work with nature? How are we creating sustainability through our models of living? What kinds of support do our communities need for resilient infrastructure for surviving and thriving, together in the face of climate and other disasters?

Our time together will include a dialogue, embodied activities, and a brief screening of a video featuring the NETWORK project’s premiere at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the Santa Cruz mountains in July 2022. Tea, coffee, and light snacks will be available.

About the Panel

Krista DeNio is an interdisciplinary choreographer, director, performer, writer and educator. She facilitates creative projects based on the principles and practices of ensemble-based theater. Her work is based in embodied experience, social justice, civic engagement and human-to-human interaction. MovingGround produces collaborative, interdisciplinary performance experiences using site-specific and audience-interactive models. She builds community, facilitates dialogue across differences, and creates common ground. www.movingground.org.

Diane Butler is a dance-movement artist, teacher, and cultural program director who has collaborated with artists from varied cultures and faiths in the Americas, Europe, and Asia for 38 years. Since 2001 resided in Bedulu and Tejakula in Bali, Indonesia. She and Suprapto Suryodarmo co-founded DharmaNatureTime Foundation with members in eight nations to support interculture in cultural environments through sharing in the arts, religiosity, and nature. Diane is an alumna of the 2011 UNITAR World Heritage Training; holds a BFA in Dance (The Juilliard School); MALS in Dance & Culture (Wesleyan University); and Ph.D. in Cultural Studies (Universitas Udayana, Bali) where since 2014 she has served as an Associate Professor. Since 1997, Diane offers Awakening InterArts workshops.

Theresa Harlan is the founder and director of the Alliance for Felix Cove, a grassroots Indigenous-women-led organization working to protect, restore and reclaim her family’s 19th century ancestral home at Point Reyes National Seashore. Theresa is an advocate for the re-matriation of ancestral homelands on public lands and the use of Indigenous science to restore these homelands. She is the 2022 winner of the Anthony Grassroots Prize, an award from the Rose Foundation, recognizing an outstanding example of inspiration grassroots environmental activism. Her family’s story is featured in Emergence Magazine’s podcast “Coming Home to the Cove“. Theresa is a published writer with op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and Marin Independent Journal. Published essays include, “A View of Our Home, Tomales Bay, Calif.: Portrait of a Coast Miwok Family, 1930-1945” in Our People, Our Land, Our Images: Indigenous Photographers, Heyday Books, 2006. Born in San Francisco, Theresa Harlan was raised by Elizabeth Campigli Harlan (Támal-ko/Coast Miwok) and John Harlan. By birth she is Jemez Pueblo and an enrolled member of Kewa Pueblo of New Mexico.

Ken Otter: For the past 30 years, the presence of this place–unceded ancestral lands and waters of the Coastal Miwok of the Tomales Bay–has been one of Ken’s greatest blessings and teachers. It informs his life and lifework in profound and generative ways. Professionally, Ken designs and facilitates innovative and transformative learning experiences for people in academic, organizational, and community settings to cultivate embodied presence, creativity, and a deep kinship with the living earth to bring about health and wisdom in self and society. The life and work of Anna Halprin and Joanna Macy, with whom he studied intensively, are significant streams of influence in this work.

Claire Peaslee is a long-time Point Reyes community member. A naturalist and holder of Earth-based ceremony; a writer; a teacher and performer of Action Theater improvisation; a salt-water swimmer; and now a West Marin climate activist: Claire credits greater Point Reyes for her fortunate life.

A movement score will be offered from Jennifer Monson/iLAND.

Jennifer Monson (iLAND) is a choreographer, performer, and teacher. Since 1983, she has explored strategies in choreography, improvisation, and collaboration in experimental dance. In 2000, her work took a new turn to investigate the relationship between movement and environment. This ongoing research has led her into inquiries of cultural and scientific understandings of large-scale phenomena such as animal navigation and migration, geological formations such as aquifers, and re-functioned sites such as the abandoned Ridgewood Reservoir. These studies provide the means to unearth and inquire into choreographic and embodied ways of knowing and reimagining our relationship to the environments and spaces humans/all beings inhabit. Her projects BIRD BRAIN (2000-2005), iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir (2007), and the Mahomet Aquifer Project (2008-2010), SIP (sustained immersive process)/watershed are investigations that have radically reframed the role dance plays in our cultural understandings of nature and wilderness. Her current work Live Dancing Archive proposes that choreography itself is an archival practice for environmental phenomena.

NTAFLF- No one turned away for lack of funds. Please email claire@dancepalace.org for a free ticket.