March 29-April 9

Humboldt University creative  engagement and cultural protocol research with Native community members

California Big Time & Social Gathering
at Humboldt State University, Arcata CA
on Saturday April 7 from 12:00 noon -7:00 pm

Description:

Come join HSU’s American Indian community at the 5th Annual California Big Time and Social Gathering.

There will be traditional cultural sharing of songs and dance by Point Arena Coastal Pomo Dance Group, a flower dance and brush dance demonstrations, Indian card game tournament, red cedar drum and artists and vendors.

April 9-22

Choreographic Residency at UC Riverside, public showing of work in progress April 19, alongside renowned Maori choreographer Jack Gray. Public invited to activities in the below link !

S2012 Indigenous Choreographer jsm FLYER 2

National Hispanic Cultural Center celebrates “Women in Creativity” month in March !

DANCING EARTH’S “NIGHT OF STARS*MOON*WATER” COMES TO THE NATIONAL HISPANIC CULTURAL CENTER

ALBUQUERQUE – Dancing Earth, the nation’s award-winning Indigenous contemporary dance ensemble, is proud to announce “Night of Stars*Moon*Water,” its first festival of Indigenous performing arts,  in partnership with the National Hispanic Cultural Center. This unique event, moving from powwow to poetry and percussion in a vital and riveting expression of diversity, will take place on Friday, March 9th and Saturday, March 10th at 8 PM in the NHCC’s Albuquerque Journal Theatre, Roy E. Disney Center for Performing Arts

“Night of Stars*Moon*Water*” features international  Indigenous performing artists, including Dancing Earth’s own soloists, Ananya Dance Theater of Minneapolis who works in contemporary idiom incorporating Odissi dance of India, Orixa dances,  guest alumna from the Santa Fe Indian School Poetry Team, Miss Blackfoot Nation of Canada 2008, and unforgettable songstress Sina Soul.  Each will take to the stage in a stunning solo that highlights their special talents like stars shining in the night.  Showcasing the individual humanity at the core of devotion to the emerging field of Indigenous contemporary arts, these courageous, innovative performers embody the essence of what it means to bring culture to life.

The festival will support the creation of Dancing Earth’s new work, an eco-production dedicated to awareness of Native perspectives on water. In honor of this upcoming theme, festival performances will culminate in a multidisciplinary improvisation about water, with vocals, rhythms, movement, and poetry combining in a ritual of intention.

Tickets for “Night of Stars*Moon*Water” are $15, $20, and $25, and can be purchased in person at the NHCC box office at 505 724 4771 , or at the Center’s website at www.nhccnm.org. The NHCC is located at 1701 4th Street SW on the corner of 4th Street and Avenida César Chávez.

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HERE ARE SOME LINKS TO SOME OF THE AMAZING GUEST PERFORMERS BELOW !

http://www.sinasoul.com : Soul is a Zulu Queen, ordained by Afrika Bambaata, curandera & griot, named Wumei or ‘beautiful warrior’ by Mokotaidejekan. She womanifests a synthesized shamanic sound that synthesizes harmonic healing with a soothing of the senses.Her proliferation as an international underground icon stems from work as a multi-lingual lyrical activist & multi-instrumental vocalist to Hip Hop Culture educator & lecturing socioethnomusicoloist. In layman’s terms, Soul sings in 8 languages, is a trained classical pianist, a fierce percussionist and a true JazzMaster of the voice

http://www.ananyadancetheatre.org  : Artistic director Ananya Chatterjea, lauded by Ms. Magazine as one of the “choreographers who are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a woman and a dancer,” founded ADT in 1996 after witnessing political theater as a form of consciousness-raising in communities of color. Using the Indian classical-dance form Odissi as her choreographic starting point, Chatterjea innovated a style that articulates social critique while advancing artistic excellence. Her original choreographic model for practice and performance transforms the company’s factual research, storytelling and creative activities into metaphor and movement with the power to changes viewers’ lives

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We are excited to announce our first Summer Dance Arts intensive, click here for announcement, and please contact DancingEarth2012@gmail.com for application, due March 31st !

DE_SummerAnnouncement

DATE : Sunday Feb 5th

TIME : 2- 430 pm, please arrive on time!

COST : Donations are welcome, to cover costs of space rental and honorariums for artist-facilitators ! Nobody turned away for lack of funds.

LOCATION : WAREHOUSE 21 , and OUTDOORS

WHO : Please join other Santa Fe community members, along with students recruited from our national workshops who are driving in from Colorado and Arizona, and some of our DANCING EARTH company members who will join us after the morning rehearsal

WHAT : creative inter-disciplinary creative art process, centered in movement, to explore this theme as a community in the high desert. Learning beyond thinking, from the profound realm of expression, about the effect of Water on our dreams, our stories, our collective psyche within our family, our neighbors, our region , our planet. ( and how our actions and choices affect water )

BRING : Feel free to bring comfortable clothing, snacks and water bottles, as well as sketchbooks, notebooks, cameras, songs, collages, offerings, snacks, articles, statistics, anything that can stir memory, consciousness, imagination. You can participate in the simple warmup and imagination/memory visualizations, but move into creative response in any art form ( maybe give me a heads up of how you might want to participate, so I can plan)

Photographer Henry Weinstein

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Feb 26- March 4 Rulan Tangen at TALKING STICK FESTIVAL, Vancouver BC

* Rulan Tangen Master Class Saturday Feb 25th from 1pm-3pm at the Dance Centre

http://fullcircleperformance.ca/content.asp?ChapterID=2&SubchapterID=5&PageID=4&portal=1

Curated by Raven Spirit Dance in partnership with the 2012 Talking Stick Festival and complimented by a series of artist talks, panels, dance workshops and professional development opportunities.

Click here for a link to the Talking Stick Festival.

“The moment of an impulse is the collision of inherited world-views, traditional and urban cosmologies, and personal and collective histories. From this place, one dances and creates and it is how one arrives at an expression that is a distinct reflection and response to our cultural selves.” – Raven Spirit Dance Society

Curatorial Statement:
What is it to be “On the Cusp” of something? Something that is new, something that pushes the edge of what is comfortable, challenges the notion of what you thought you knew something to be? The artists have been selected as part of the first Contemporary Aboriginal Dance showcase at this year’s Talking Stick Festival as the questions of who am I? where am I? what am I? In quiet contemplative ways, in still ways, in loud, erratic, provocative and challenging ways. In ways that search for an answer that is sometimes found amongst a vast northern landscape or in abstracted digital urban-scapes, in high mountain deserts that thirst for water or in the depths of our own dark inner caverns sometimes slipping just out of grasp. These moments in time allow you, the audience, to dig deeper with us as artists as we find a new place, a new edge and a new understanding of what is possible together as we push the boundaries and perceptions of our Contemporary Indigenous dance practice. We hope you enjoy the journey with us.

November brought us to the end of an amazing two years of touring of “Of Bodies Of Elements” in Marty, South Dakota and Durango, Colorado last month, where over 1500 youth and community members participated in workshops and attended performances. 

In Marty, we were very honored by elder Germaine Tremmel from whom we had initiated the cultural protocol of asking permission to share our dances on Lakota/ Dakota land which has been kept alive with their songs and dances since the beginning of time. She gifted the company members with buffalo bone earrings and carved eagle feather necklaces and invited us to return and keep their youth happy.

In Durango, we held many workshops for a vast range of enthusiastic community members at the Southern Ute Cultural Center and on the campus of Fort Lewis College.

Read our latest review by Ellen Berkovitch from AdobeAirstream HERE.
!Thank You AdobeAirStream!

The following week, Rulan and dancer Daniel Arizmendi danced in a duet to support Jacoh Hernandez Cortes’ Cuicacalli dance program at student concerts at the Brava Theater in San Francisco and the Ashkenaz Center in Berkeley. Congratulations Jacoh for a wonderful 4th year of “Tradicion, Movimiento y Pasion!”
(photo courtesy by Cuicacalli)

THIS MONTH In early December, Director Tangen attends the National Performance Network conference in Tampa Florida.  Winter holidays will be devoted to research, conceptualization, and fundraising for our proposed new work: Walking the Edge of Water  photo by Paulo T. Photography Indigenous Guest Artists from Canada and New Zealand are applying for funding from their respective governments to join DANCING EARTH’s ensemble for creation of the new production of ‘Walking The Edge of Water” March 9-11, 2012 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.	UPCOMING The proposed new cycle of water dances have already received invitations for excerpt appearances and related community engagement workshops at sites including Talking Stick Festival in Vancouver in February and Hemispheric Encuentro of Performance and Politics in Mexico City in March, as well as artistic residencies for creative research and community engagement at Humboldt State University in Arcata, UC Riverside, and Trent University on Ontario in 2012.  These prestigious international invitations require support for travel costs; Please consider making a donation to help bring the dance embodiment of powerful messaging about our most precious  resource to our global community! Click here for Donation Form photo by Paulo T. Photography
GRATITUDE As the year closes, we hold gratitude in our hearts for all those who have made the amazing journey of  “Of Bodies of Elements” possible. Since inception in January 2010, we have given 25 performances in 16 locations, 8 states, over 50 related workshops, and reached well over 18,000 audience members and workshop participants!  We acknowledge all the dancers who helped create the material since 2004, including Alejandro Meraz, Anthony Collins, Quetzal Guerrero, Kalani Queypo, Jessica Marisol Allen, Lawrence Santiago, Raoul Trujlllo, Edgar Soto, Sarracina Littlebird, Nichole Salazar, Gina Pacaldo, Serena Rascon, Deollo Johnson, Eric Lopez, Eagle Young, Ehren Natay, Erika Archer, Amy Becenti, Jacoh Hernandez Cortes, Alyxis Trujillo, Jose Meraz, Ariane Estrada, Atsina Allen, Rulan Harjo, and Camila Cortes. Your movements have brought collective dreams to life! We also thank the generous artists including choreographer Raoul Trujillo; aerial coaches Deirdre Morris and Consuelo Wind; Tech Directors Deirdre Morris and Ron Mier;Production Managers Alejandro Quintana and Paulo Tavares; composers Robbie Robertson, Olivia Tailfeathers, Ulali, Alejandro Aguerre, Barrett Martin, Quetzal Guerrero, Robert Mirabal; costume designers Consuelo Wind, “Marama” Tracey Lloyd and Joseph Moncado; and photographers Paulo Tavares, Jennifer Esperanza, Elizabeth Opalenik, Anthony Collins, Alejandro Quintana, AMT Productions, Iscah Trujillo, Kate Russell, Tanana Rivera and Ernest Trujillo.
DANCING EARTH expresses gratitude for support fromthe generosity of our Membership Circle including:  LEADERS Bioneers Moonrise Grant New Mexico McCune Foundation NEA Challenge America National Dance Project Zellerbach Family Fund Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation Margaret Schink Diane Karp Lauren Embrey SPONSORS La Fonda On the Plaza El FarolElaine Reuben Carrie Stiles Dorothy Abbott Cynda Arsenault FRIENDS Lynne Buchen Yvonne Montoya Jacqueline Shea Murphy Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton Peter Mattair Anonymous Garth Clark Gwen Wells La Posada of Santa Fe photo by Paulo T. Photography
“Of Bodies Of Elements ” related educational workshops developed by in part by Ms. Tangen at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts RACE AND ENVIRONMENT initiative; and “INVOKATION” community ritual exercises are developed with support provided by the Indigenous Contemporary Expressive  Arts Program, National Museum of American Indian.  We also thank Anemone and the Mars family (who shared the Sunflower dance concept of the Naragansett First Nation with us), Alice Loy and Tom Aageson of Global Centre for Cultural Entrereneurship, Professor Jacqueline Shea Murphy of UC Riverside, Janet Eigner, Michael Reed, Asphalt Apache Designs, Diane Karp and Michelle LaFlamme Childs of SFAI, Patsy Phillips and Sallie Wesaw at MoCNA, Roseta Santiago, Denise Wallace, Joan Lombardi, Julien McRoberts, Anthony Hassett and Guy at THE magazine, Jennifer Noyer, Rita Feliciano and SF Bay Guardian, Brent Michael Davids, Giacomo Zarafano, Freda and David at El Farol, Dee Martinez, Julie Brette Adams and NM Dance Coalition, Joaquin Newman of Forrealism, Aysen New, Norma Diala, Sione Tangen, Staci Golar, Erica Ayala, Erika Archer, Garth Clark, Jayne Nordstrom and the Wheelwright Museum, Elisa Keir, Graciela Gonzales, Amy Christian and Wise Fool NM, Yolanda Trujillo, Pasha Hogan, Barbara Z,  Jodie Verenya Franco, Alexis Brown, Tracy Collins, Hyda Maria, Amy Bertucci, Gwen Wells, Lisa Estrada, Angela Culbertson, Jack Rosser, Jhane Myers, Rebecca Chornenky, Gisela Genchow, Lee Miller, Roxxi O’Hara, Rae Walker, Marion Wasserman at Elemental Designs, Valerie Ingram, Kathryn Mark, David and Freda at El Farol, Nina, Cara and Peter at Bioneers, Susanna and Primitive Makeup, College of Santa Fe’s Paula Amanda, Mykel Diaz, Janey Potts, Angela Culbertson, Adam McKinney and students of New Mexico School For the Arts, Railyard Performance Center, Yoga Moves, Martine Amenda, BJ Davis, Legends Gallery, Kiva Gallery, Blue Rain Gallery, Lensic Theater’s Bob Martin, Marj Neset of VSA N4th Art Center; filmmakers Jonathan Sims, Kokopele Video, and Craig Hansen Video Professor Mary-Jean Cowell and the dance department of Washington University on which some sections were workshopped. And, thanks to Moving People Dance, CENTER Santa Fe, Wise Fool New Mexico, CellSpace of San Francisco, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, and Santa Fe Art Institute for gracious donation of rehearsal space! A special thanks to all the community members who joined our workshops this year, in California (San Francisco, Sherman Indian School, Riverside, Marin, Arcata), Montana, Canada, New Mexico (Espanola, Albuquerque and Santa Fe), South Dakota and Durango Colorado! The 2010 creation of “Of Bodies of Elements” was made possible by the MetLife Community Connections Fund of the National Dance Project, a program administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts. Major support for the National Dance Project is also provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Community partnership was led by Santa Fe Art Institute, with Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship, VSA North Fourth Art Center’s Global Dance Festival and Two Worlds Festival, National Dance Institute of New Mexico, Santa Fe Opera’s Pueblo Opera Program, National Hispanic Cultural Center, College of Santa Fe, Southwestern Association for Indian Art, Moving People/Santa Fe Dance Festival, Wise Fool New Mexico, No Reservations Film Productions,  Institute of American Indian Art’s College and Museum of Native Contemporary Art.
Wishing all the extended circle of DANCING EARTH a year of health, happiness, gratitude and creativity!

photo by Paulo T. Photography

http://vimeopro.com/bioneers/2011conferencevideo/video/31215101
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photo by Elizabeth Opalenik of  Ehren Natay and Jesus Jacoh Cortes

‘At the Hemispheric Encuentro 2007, Centro Cultural de Recoleto,  of Buenos Aires , Argentina . Dancer Rulan Tangen, Artist Leland Chapin)

Ongoing : Cuicacalli  dance training for San Francisco youth at the Brava Theater ; for information on our October 12 Fundraiser please contact cuicacalli.sf@gmail.com in order to learn more about our comprehensive dance training offered to youth regardless of income level

In Santa Fe,  DANCING EARTH’s amazing aerial coach and costume designer Connie Wind Walker is giving Thursday afternoon classes for youth , including dance, circus techniques and poi spinning; please contact consuelowind@gmail.com

Erika Archer teaches hiphop classes at National Dance Institute , and Moving Arts Espanola

Rulan Tangen will travel up north to Springer New Mexico to work with kindergarten-5th grade on a Beatles-inspired show with the National Dance Institute.

For Oct and November, stay tuned for performances at he Bioneers Conference in CA ( Oct 16) ,  Marty South Dakota ( Nov 3 ) , Durango Colorado ( Nov 11) , Las Vegas NM Nov 13 ( to be confirmed) ,  Cuicacalli concert at Brava Theater in San Francisco Nov 19 and Ashkenaz Center in East Bay Nov 20 !

Also, we are planning a beautiful Autumn Celebration fundraising event at the Legends Gallery in downtown Santa Fe, to introduce guests to the overall vision of DANCING EARTH. For more info or to request/reserve a seat, please contact mgmt@dancingearth.org

AUGUST 6-9 : Workshop sessions to be offered to Indigenous performers for possibility of apprenticeship with company, pls contact Rulan @dancingearth.org for details

AUGUST 11 : We are honored to be invited by the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center to participate in their private event for invited guests on August 11th

AUGUST 12 : Santa Fe Art Institute hosts a lecture by Director Rulan Tangen, about the creative process of DANCING EARTH as a metaphor for diversity, as well as expanding understanding of Indigenous identity

AUGUST 18 : On Thursday : we hold a special preview for our local Native community members, as invited by the Santa Fe Opera’s Peublo Opera Program. Please contact mgmt@dancingearth.org to make your reservations asap !

****AUGUST 19 lease join us on Friday at 8 pm at James A Little Theater on the campus of NM School for the Deaf on Cerrillos Road, in celebration of the arts and artists on historic Indian Market . Tickets will be available  at the Lensic Box Office, AT THIS LINK :

http://www.ticketssantafe.org/tsf/event_calendar/detail/906

Meanwhile, look for artwork and jewelry of  Ehren Natay on the Plaza during Indian Market !

Thank you for joining us and sharing in this experience !

This month also features a DANCING EARTH artist on cover of Local Flavor magazine – the multi-talented Jaque Fragua!

Thank you to LOCAL FLAVOR, KSFR’s Rhea Goodman, Greenfire Times, Santa Fe NewMexican’s PASATIEMPO,  TREND, THE magazine, NATIVE PEOPLES Magazine, SF Reporter, Albq Journal,  and especially Janet Eigner for her thoughtful preview on KUNM and Santa Fe One Heart , see below:

DANCE TRAINING WITH YOUTH IN CALIFORNIA, NEW MEXICO AND SOUTH DAKOTA !

IN CALIFORNIA : Jacoh Cortes directs our associate  summer youth training wing of Cuicacalli , with music instructor Ariane Cortes, daily starting July 5 t the Brava Theater of San Francisco. See www.cuicacalliescueladedanza.com for information.

IN SOUTH DAKOTA : Deollo Johnson heads to South Dakota this month, as invited by community members he met at the UNITY Conference last summer in San Diego.  He is directing a 4 day intensive of leadership training.

IN NEW MEXICO : Rulan begins choreography for performance students this month at Moving Arts Espanola where she joins colleagues Roger Montoya and Serena Rascon , along with their associate Salvador Ruiz,  in the wonderful multi- art training they have been doing year round with youth. Moving Arts Espanola MAE, offers 30 weeks per year of low cost ,quality arts mentoring in Music, Dance ,Drama and the Visual arts  for children and youth in the Española Valley and surrounding communities. The eight week Summer Session June 13- August 13 will culminate with the Festival of Performing Arts at the Northern New Mexico College Theater. www.movingartsespanola.org