We invite you to this revival of SEEDS in celebration of Earthdance's 30th Anniversary!
(photo credits: Olive Bieringa)
Work Study
Scholarships
Earthdance cancellation policy
Check out our quick VIDEO GUIDE to the festival
The festival includes:
- Workshops with Sherwood Chen, Emily Johnson, Marbles Jumbo Radio, festival curators + residency participants.
- 6 day workshop:
- Second Natures with Sherwood Chen
6 days (Tuesday Eve, 20th - Sunday, 25th)
- Second Natures with Sherwood Chen
- 6 day workshop:
- SEEDS Mini-Festival Weekend (Friday eve, September 16th - Sunday, 18th)
with workshops in dance, permaculture, and culture of place; a seeds exchange; and other special events.- Mini-Festival Workshops
- Wrecking Walden: Landing Stories with Marbles Jumbo Radio (must attend Saturday and Sunday 10am-1pm)
- Conjuring Future Joy with Emily Johnson (Saturday, 17th only, 3pm-10pm)
- Activating Allyship with Aiyana Masla, Hana van der Kolk & Margit Galanter (must attend Saturday and Sunday 10am-1pm)
- SEEDS Exchange (Sunday, 18th only, 3pm-6pm)
- Mini-Festival Workshops
- Community Day Saturday, September 24th 12pm-12am with performances, workshops, research presentations, and dancing all day long. All are welcome! Donations collected at door. Please RSVP to contact@earthdance.net
(you do not need to register online for this event)
- Festival Retreat Days Available throughout the SEEDS festival. Come retreat, experience the festival environment, and participate in evening sharings, presentations, etc. open to the community. These may be combined with festival workshops.
- Creative Residencies (curated)
Schedule
Friday 9/16 | Saturday 9/17 | Sunday 9/18 | Monday 9/19 | Tuesday 9/20 | Wednesday 9/21 | Thursday 9/22 | Friday 9/23 | Saturday 9/24 | Sunday 9/25 | |||
5pm Arrival | Workshop schedule - 10am-1pm and 3pm-6pm daily | 3pm Departure | ||||||||||
8-9am breakfast 1-2pm lunch 6-7pm dinner | ||||||||||||
WEEKEND MINI-FESTIVAL | COMMUNITY DAY | |||||||||||
Friday Evening SEEDS Festival Welcome | Mini-Festival Weekend Participation See above for more information on workshops and other special events. | Join us from 12pm-12am for performances, workshops, research presentations, and dancing. | ||||||||||
[Cancelled] Foundations of Embodying Permaculture with Kay Cafasso & Will Shields – Mini-Festival Full Weekend Workshop | ||||||||||||
Second Natures with Sherwood Chen - 6-day workshop (Tuesday evening - Sunday afternoon) | ||||||||||||
8-10pm Evening Sessions include workshops, discussions, informal showings, dance parties - TBA | ||||||||||||
SEEDS is produced + curated by the SEEDS festival team: Olive Bieringa, Melinda Buckwalter, Jason Comcowich, Christos Galanis, Margit Galanter, Will Shields, & Hana van der Kolk
Work Study
Scholarships
Earthdance cancellation policy
6-10 Day Workshops
Second Natures with Sherwood Chen (September 20th-25th)
All-Inclusive Tuition, Room & Board
Professional Rate: $600
Full Price: $550
Subsidized Rate: $500
SEEDS Mini-Festival Weekend
- Full Weekend Workshops
[Cancelled] Foundations of Embodying Permaculture with Kay Cafasso & Will Shields (September 16th-18th)
All-Inclusive Tuition, Room & Board
Professional Rate: $275
Full Price: $250
Subsidized Rate: $225
- Mini-Festival Weekend
Wrecking Walden: Landing Stories with Marbles Jumbo Radio
(only for those who identify as people of color) (must attend Saturday and Sunday 10am-1pm)
Activating Allyship with Aiyana Masla, Margit Galanter and Hana van der Kolk (must attend Saturday and Sunday 10am-1pm)
Conjuring Future Joy with Emily Johnson (Sat only, 3pm-10pm)
SEEDS Exchange (Sun only, 3pm-6pm)
All-Inclusive Tuition, Room & Board
Full Weekend (Friday eve 16th - Sunday 18th)
Professional Rate: $185
Full Price: $165
Subsidized Rate: $145
Single Day (Saturday 17th or Sunday 18th)
Professional Rate: $85
Full Price: $75
Subsidized Rate: $65
Festival Retreat Days: $40/day
(on the registration form sign up for your desired "Single Day")
Workshop Descriptions & Teacher Bios:
Second Natures with Sherwood Chen
Wednesday-Sunday, September 21-25
This workshop includes: rhythmic studio training, sensory exercises, partnered movement research, and building personal and collective imagery to generate landscape-driven and/or landscape-derived work. We work with our direct senses, physical limits and sense memory towards a porosity between flesh, bone, imagination, and space, yielding impossible and/or newfound bodies.
Let's track tension and interplay between dancing within a terrain and dancing a terrain. Let's recognize the body as colony. To investigate strategies and performative yield of what it could mean to be danced by a terrain. Let's admit identification as parasitic colonizer. To tread upon the dangers and values of a danced anthropocentrism.
How do we hone consciousness of our imported projections upon a specific land with which most of us have had recent and/or no history? How do we negotiate caution, hubris, and mutuality in the name of constructing individual and collective dances in nature?
Dress for the weather. Dress to sweat. Bring your curiosity and your inquisitive, receptive body.
Sherwood Chen (US/FR) has worked as a performer with artists including Anna Halprin, Xavier Le Roy, Min Tanaka, l’agence touriste, Sara Shelton Mann, inkBoat, Ko Murobushi, Grisha Coleman, and Liz Santoro. He co-founded the dance collaborative Headmistress with Oakland-based choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith. He has lead movement workshops internationally in-studio and in natural and urban landscapes in places including Ménagerie de Verre (Paris), Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo), Independent Dance/Siobahn Davies Studios (London), Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), Chez Bushwick (Brooklyn), Arlequi (Banyoles), and EDEN / Dock 11 (Berlin). For over twenty years, he has contributed to Body Weather research initiated by Tanaka and his associates.
[Cancelled] Foundations of Embodying Permaculture with Kay Cafasso & Will Shields
Friday-Sunday, September 16-18 (first weekend)
Explore and orient with the outer and inner grounds of permaculture with Kay Cafasso and Will Shields as we develop a vegetative swale to regenerate the land at Earthdance. Sessions will include: Reading the Landscape, Plant and Nature Connection, Permaculture Design Practice, Deep Ecology, Directing Water Flow for Abundance, Garden Meditations and Movement Practices for Gardeners.
Kay Cafasso is a certified permaculture designer practicing the thoughtful design of ecological landscapes. Kay is Director of Sowing Solutions Permaculture Design & Education, offering ecological garden design services for homeowners and land stewards. Sowing Solutions also offers Permaculture Design Certification Courses twice a year in Western MA, and has led over 20 Permaculture Design Certification Courses (PDC’s) to date nationwide over the last decade. Kay is inspired by contemplative practices in the gardens, and passionate about growing medicine and healing through music and dance.
Will Shields is a pupil of systems and their intrinsic relationship to other systems. Ecologically motivated, he weaves a myriad of subjects into a more integrated holism. By connecting the realms of music theory, herbalism, physics, living pharmacies, ecology, edible ecosystems, regenerative design, and bio-intensive gardening, he hopes to create a fabric of land management that enhances current systems at Earthdance. He also aims to facilitate environmental literacy while simultaneously broadening interest in systems design. The heartbeat of motivation for this avid permaculturist is a harmonious livelihood that cooperates with nature and builds a healthy community.
Wrecking Walden: Landing Stories with Marbles Jumbo Radio
A practice and exploration of belonging for people of color
Friday-Sunday, September 16-18 (first weekend)
What does it require for us as artists, academics, and interventionists of color to feel into our bodies in a culture and place that has been historically unrepresentative of and inaccessible to us? What would our practice become if we did not side step the impacts of racism, but rather included our whole experience as we move, write, and perform/observe the marginalized body back into the landscape? What will it take to dismantle the scripts that, thus far, prevented certain experiences from feeling they belong here?
The curriculum, process, and discussions, will reference bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place and journal excerpts from Jumbo Radio’s ongoing community initiative. Some questions/prompts to feed our movement investigation and conversation: What does entering a zone of white flight require of our nervous systems and brains, and what does that raise in our embodied sensory experience? What soil amendments are needed for such restorative justice? What knowledge, histories, fictions, desires, and memories of ours are left out of these spaces out of fear that they too will get appropriated/colonized? DO TELL/embody how complicated it is.
Marbles Jumbo Radio places the queered, marginalized body as a central subject through dance and physical practice. Their work has been presented in New York at HERE, Danspace Project, and Joyce SOHO, and in Los Angeles at REDCAT, Dance Camera West, Anatomy Riot, Pieter, and LACE. They are a 2008 CHIME grant recipient, and with mentor Simone Forti, they created the performance and practice of Ice Bergs. More recent projects include performance for Meg Wolfe’s New Faithful Disco, Andrea Geyer's video installation, Truly, Spun, Never, and their on going collaboration with Yann Novak in Johanna Breiding's installation, We Love Our Parents, We Fear Snakes. www.vimeo.com/takemetomarbles
Activating Allyship with Aiyana Masla, Hana van der Kolk & Margit Galanter
Practice Site: www.
Conjuring Future Joy with Emily Johnson
Saturday, September 17 only
We will conjure future joy. We will let nothing exist. What do you want for yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your city? We will talk about this. We will come up with some ideas we can make happen. And we’ll dance. We will improvise movement and stories for and with one another; aware of what we believe about ourselves and what we completely make up. What joys have you experienced? Some stories will be voiced, some silent. (It’s the silent ones that are really exciting to me right now.) We will begin to be comfortable, really comfortable in silence. We will begin to understand and listen to silence. We will watch each other with keen interest, respect, and love. There will be a lot of watching, along with the doing. I told someone once that it might feel like watching a tree: you sit or stand or lay on the ground and watch the wind move through a tree; you notice it is green or brown and that it rests with the sky. (photo by Chris Cameron)Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. A Bessie Award winning choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow, she is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City. Originally from Alaska, she is of Yup’ik descent and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, history, and role in community. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present, and future. Emily received a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award; her work is supported by Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Creative Capital, Map Fund, a Joyce Award, the McKnight Foundation, and The Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. Emily was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota 2013 - 2014 and an inaugural 2014 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency. She is a current Mellon Foundation Choreography Fellow at Williams College. With her collaborators she recently completed the third in a trilogy of works: The Thank-you Bar, Niicugni, and SHORE. She is in the process of making Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars, an all night outdoor performance gathering taking place on and near eighty-four community-hand-made quilts. www.catalystdance.com