curriculum for wildness
summary
Concept + Performance — Erin Palovick + mary grace allerdice
Sound — Erin Palovick
Costumes — Erin Palovick + mary grace allerdice
April + May 2021
at Blue Heron Nature Preserve
as part of the Art of Nature Exhibition curated by Steven Anderson
This performance is intended as an offering, a map, towards our connectedness -- a performance for the reciprocity and interdependence which is Life.
We performed two live performances: one for the opening (Light) and one for the closing of the exhibition (Dark). Each performance was in a different area of the park. We will created a series movement scores that we explored in real time, taking the audience on a journey through the park. Because of this, there was variation to each performance and perhaps different questions revealed as we interacted with different ecosystems within the preserve.
selected proposal notes
“Wildness is the interconnectedness of all things.”
_ Dr. Vandana Shiva
The Oxford UK Dictionary defines “nature” as the following:
The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.
In Western, industrialized culture we have literally written ourselves out of the definition of nature; we have even considered ourselves in opposition to it. But the reality of our human condition is that we are interdependent with nature and are unable to exist outside of nature.
For the exhibition Into the Wild, we are proposing a durational performance that activates different parts of the preserve and investigates the idea of connection as our wildness. As beings of interstellar material who evolved from plant matter, we are both bodies of light and bodies of earth. What does it mean to inhabit both of these identities within our planetary Nature?
As we perform, we make an experiment of extraordinary presence — the way animals or plants instinctively, fully inhabit the present moment. Our movement score will allow for real-time, instinctive decisions based upon pre-decided conceptual structures and movement vocabulary.
Our movement will interact with organic strung materials that are connected to our bodies as we interact with the place around us. These materials will leave a visible trail of our connectedness and create limitations, edges, to what we are able to execute. This trail will cast a map on where we’ve been and where we are -- our maps that are our human attempt to organize the wild.
It is our intention to perform as an extension of the environment, to be fully synced within it; this is in active opposition to the idea that we are excluded from Nature or that we superimpose ourselves onto its context.
We propose that it is our embodiment that is wild.
In answer to the question: how would our project make this place more or less wild? That depends. If humans are, actually, written out of nature, then our presence here makes the place less wild. But if we are here to synchronize with the environment and understand it as the architecture that makes our existence possible, then our presence can both partake in the wildness and learn from it.
To be wild in these bewildering times is to bring it home and re-member, put back together, the context in which humans evolved to thrive. As animals, as interstellar particles, it is our interconnection that wilds us. Connected to both Earth and Sky like the trees, we weave above-ground systems of connections like their roots. To be wild is to understand that our entanglements and mapmaking are all happening within those of the wi(l)der world.
This performance is intended as an offering, a map, towards our connectedness -- a performance for the reciprocity and interdependence which is Life.
We propose two live performances: one for the opening and one for the closing of the exhibition. We will create movement scores that incorporate these ideas so that we can explore and work them out in real time. Because of this, there will be variation to each performance and perhaps different questions revealed as we interact with different ecosystems within the preserve.
