ELEMENTS OF DANCING EARTH A Masterclass in the Foundational Movement of Dancing Earth

Monday, June 8 · 9:00am Wise Fool Santa Fe

Dancing Earth's Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer Rulan Tangen offers a movement experience for all beings — with Earth as body and body as Earth.

From gentle to dynamic, the movement flows to invite the body as earth and the earth as body. Individual expression becomes part of a collective whole as we grow full-bodied empathy for all living beings as kin within Earth's interconnected ecosystem. Through empathy, balance, and embodiment, we experience kinship, advocacy, relation-building, and movement as movement-building.

Practices may include:

• Breath, sound, presence, activation, and multi-directional counterbalancing

• Eco-somatic, multi-sensory, multidisciplinary embodiment practices

• Dancing Earth forms drawn from rocks, wind, water, seeds, plants, four-leggeds, and winged ones

• Personal interpretation of the inner dreamscape and outer landscape

• Collective rhythmic pulse that builds into a language beyond words

• Multi-sensorial observation, imagination, memory, intuition, and full-bodied empathy — rooted in ancestral concepts such as Kapwa: "I am who I am connected to; I am because we are"

For everyone. Movers, artists, healers, and community members of all backgrounds are welcome. No prior experience required. Self-guided modifications available for all abilities. This is Movement for All — Movement as Medicine, Movement as a Source of Knowing, and a vital force of organic migrations.

About Rulan Tangen

Rulan Tangen is a lifelong dance artist, creatrix, and dreamvisioner. Her contemporary dance practice serves as functional ritual for ecology — evoking transformation and healing. As Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer of Dancing Earth, she has passionately cultivated successive generations of local and global contemporary performing artists as intercultural creative ambassadors and conduits for social change. She is a recipient of the 2018–19 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Award for Service, Justice, Freedom, Courage, and Gratitude.

Dancing Earth creates contemporary dance and related arts through global-Indigenous and intercultural relationships centered in ecological and cultural diversity — for creativity, health, and wellness.

Afro-Peruvian Festejo Class

June 7th · 1:30pm · Railyard Performance Center

Dance to the Afro-Peruvian sounds of the box drum “el cajón”, cajita, and quijada, and learn the vibrant dance of Festejo — one of Peru’s signature coastal dances that emerged to visibilize, represent, and uplift Afro-Peruvian culture.

Traditionally danced in social gatherings and harvest celebrations, Festejo carries deep connections to fertility, abundance, sensuality, courtship, and community celebration. It continues to stand as a powerful symbol of resistance and empowerment.

In this class, Cynthia Paniagua guides students through the roots, cultural significance, history, and ritual of the basic steps, building toward a high-energy, connected dance experience.

Cynthia Paniagua is a dancer, choreographer, and educator whose work reflects her Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Andean, and Nuyorican heritage. Her practice weaves contemporary movement with Peruvian traditional dance, exploring cultural identity, Andean cosmology, spiritual practice, and Latine lived experience as a first-generation New Yorker.

As featured in the documentary Soy Andina, she has traveled extensively across the U.S. and Peru researching Peruvian folk dance, sharing her story, and teaching workshops. She is a Fulbright scholar who has spent over 15 years living between Peru and the U.S., researching ritual dances as living archives of ancestral memory, resistance, joy, and social transformation.

Her work has connected her with dance communities across the Andes, Coast, and Amazon in Peru, as well as Ecuador, Colombia, and Puerto Rico. Cynthia is a member of Bombazo Dance Company and a featured dancer in In the Heights. She was also the first choreographer commissioned by the United Nations Symphony Orchestra for the Andean work El Cóndor Pasa at the UN Forum for Indigenous Issues (2019).

She is the founder of Kaypacha Dance LLC and director of Dance Your Ancestors, a program dedicated to connecting Peruvians in the diaspora to their roots through ancestral dance exchange and cultural travel.

The Body as Compass: Diasporic Body Mapping, Somatic Care, and Wayfinding. Facilitated by Humlåo Evans

June 6 • 9AM • Wise Fool Santa Fe

The body carries everything — personal history, collective memory, and the pressures of the present moment. In this eco-somatic workshop, Humlåo Evans invites participants to explore the body as a living archive of story, survival, and imagination. Drawing from CHamoru cultural philosophy — including the creation story of Fo'na and Pontan, in which the world emerges through the transformation of a body — participants explore how the body functions as both landscape and vessel. Inspired by CHamoru traditions of ocean navigation, we reflect on how the body can orient us as a sensory compass during uncertain times.

No prior dance or somatic experience required. All movers, artists, healers, and community members welcome.

Humlåo Evans is an Atlanta-based interdisciplinary artist of Micronesian CHamoru heritage whose practice spans movement, poetry, installation, and performance. Their work explores embodied memory, cultural lineage, and the political histories the body carries — informed by nearly a decade with physically integrated dance company Full Radius Dance, and by CHamoru healing philosophies of the suruhanu, suruhana, and yoamte.

Hosted by Wise Fool Santa Fe: 1030 Midtown Calle Central, Suite 103, Santa Fe, NM, 87505-5451