Indeterminacy Festival: PASTFUTURE/FUTUREPAST (2019)

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Site: Penn Dixie Fossil Farm, Buffalo NY         Performance Date: May 2019

 

Under the direction of Stanzi Vaubel, Indeterminacy Festival is an annual site-specific, interdisciplinary arts festival that explores indeterminacy—"the various facets of uncertainty, which are typically experienced as negative, transformed into a site of creative possibility”. Each year, the festival draws together over eighty collaborators from across a wide set of backgrounds and experiences. These collaborators check in with each other periodically, but don’t come together fully until the final performance—adding to the levels of uncertainty and the need for adaptability. 

 

While serving as head choreographer for the festival in 2019, I worked separately with three different communities of dancers—one group of college-age dancers, one group of refugee youth, and one group of adults with Parkinson’s Disease. Over the course of a year, I held weekly or biweekly workshops with each community of dancers separately. The performers did not meet each other until they were on-site for the first time, one day before our public performance.

 

The theme for the festival was interstellar communication, and each group of dancers worked with parachutes. Because the process was collaborative, each group used the props in nuanced ways. The youth group used smaller parachutes to represent the planets in orbit while the senior adult group used their parachute to represent the sun. The college-age dancers used their parachutes to represent gravitational, longitudinal, and transverse wavelengths. In addition to the parachutes, the performers also wore LED wristbands as props to enhance the movement and to act as a lighting source as sundown approached.