At 3pm, join us at the Tang Museum for the first workshop, "Indigenizing Self” with Dancing Earth. This workshop opens a doorway into the personal journey of honoring ancestry, land, and spirit. Dakota Camacho will offer several Indigenous theories and practices of introducing oneself, relating to community, land, and self as revelatory tools for developing self-reflexive, autobiographical, and authentic land acknowledgment practices.
At 6pm, Rulan Tangen hosts a second workshop at the Skidmore Dance Center, Studio II: "Movement for Movement Building." Rulan invites us to move into embodiment, finding a collaborative vision for renewal and future-making through practices that have been described by participants as “decolonizing." We will experience undoing practices to release and liberate the body from habits and tensions that separate us from our own humanity, cultural legacy, and relationship with earth.
About Dancing Earth
A unique force in world dance, Dancing Earth: Contemporary Indigenous Creations gathers Native collaborators who embody intertribal ecological philosophies to re-envision contemporary dance and assert its role in society as purposeful ritual. As indigenous dancers, composers, costumers, filmmakers, and poets, Dancing Earth honors dance’s essential function in personal, social, and environmental transformation. They dance the rich diversity of Native contemporary heritage with the intent to promote ecological awareness, cultural diversity, healing and understanding between peoples. Their aesthetic embodies earth’s inherent spirit, and is created by, with, and for the land and the peoples of the land.
About In Our Own Bodies
How do identity and ancestry inform our creative work? How can performance art be used as a medium for cultural revitalization, community empowerment and social justice advocacy? What are the untapped resources we hold within ourselves? Using the lens of dance, these are some of the questions this festival will invite us to explore.
In Our Own Bodies will include workshops and performances by Dancing Earth, Urban Bush Women and Skidmore Alumna Salomé Egas ’14. These guest artists will share their impactful performance work with the Skidmore Community, and will facilitate conversations and movement-based activities designed to bring forth the memory, knowledge and creative potential that is already present in our own bodies.
This is an Intergroup Relations (IGR) Independent study led by Cinthia Duran Larrea ’19 in collaboration with Julia Gillis ’19, Stuti Bagri ’21, Sarah Maacha ’19 and Dejon Bunn ’19, with support from the Tang Teaching Museum and The Office of Student Diversity Programs (OSDP).
In Our Own Bodies Events