Exploring ways that our body, through movement, comes into collaboration with the landscape in ways that are equitable, sustainable and creative.
UmWelt – Moskosel Creative Lab & Northern Sustainable Futures, Sweden
UmWelt is a new collaborative project by photographer and filmmaker Christian Kipp and dance artist and researcher Sara Wookey. The project considers ways to make visible and felt the ways in which we come into contact with and create relations with spaces and places we reside in – both the natural and built environment – through our bodily movements, gestures and senses as we interact with other humans and non-humans. It begins by asking, what do we bring to and how are we changed by our environs? It begins in the Laplands, a new and dynamic space for us both.
We were invited to create a new work for a mobile gallery that will tour in the north (Norrbotten) and connect with local audiences. This project, as well as the Konsthall, is part of Northern Sustainable Futures (NSF), an initiative promoting sustainable processes of development across the region. Working together in 2020 on the Arts Council England-funded project A New Role for Dance in which qualities of dance – care, courage, empathy, play and resiliency – as a practice might be made visible and considered in terms of our current contemporary moment. During this residency, we will work with human movement, image, sound and film in and around the residency site take one quality per day as our guide.
Moving through Louvre Lens Landscape 2022
Lens is a former mining town on the periphery of France and home to Louvre Lens, a peripheral outpost to the central Louvre in Paris. This film was part of the project Mobilizing Peripheries by Rennie Tang and set out to explore the porosity, thicknesses and fluidity of peripheral conditions of the museum, which often appear as lines of division on a map. In collaboration with renowned landscape architect Catherine Mosbach, who designed for the museum park, and filmmaker Christian Kipp, I set up an improvisation score in which movement, landscape and camera worked together to reveal the nuances of the site by moving around the periphery and through the center, calling out the relationship between inside/outside space and the relationship the museum has to its surrounding land.
More can be found at Engaging indoor / outdoor spaces of the Louvre Lens
Action-Scape – Grand Park, Los Angeles
This performance is commissioned as part of Grand Park’s Dance Series in downtown Los Angeles and is a collaboration with architect Rennie Tang.
ACTIONscape illuminates every day human action as an integral component of the landscape. The performance calls attention to the physical landscape and urban context of Grand Park while revealing the inventory of the daily movement patterns present in the park. As the performance moves from one zone of the park to the next, movement sequences reinforce the qualities of each space and the movements of the dancer’s bodies in collaboration with those qualities whether they are intimate and quiet, vibrant and colorful or expansive and grandiose.