Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance
Performance: Friday & Saturday, July 18 & 19 at 7 pm
Patricia Nanon Theater, The Yard
In Residence July 7-20
Choreographer Jody Sperling and her Time Lapse Dance ensemble present a visually stunning program exploring human entanglement with nature. Featured works highlight the acclaimed climate-engaged collaboration between Sperling and environmental composer Matthew Burtner. Arbor dwells on the intimacy of trees. In Wind Rose, dancers render changing atmospheric patterns palpable to sight, sound, and touch. The program also features Freedive, a work-in-progress to be developed during the company’s residency at The Yard, which delves into aquatic themes of submersion and inundation. All these works use the company's signature style harnessing transformative costuming that abstract the essence of human movement into elemental and organic forces.
Founded and directed by choreographer Jody Sperling, Time Lapse Dance (TLD) envisions dance as a powerful force that can help move us toward a more embodied, sustainable, and equitable future. The work, which merges artistic and scientific research, investigates the relationship of human movers to ecological systems. The company’s unique style expands upon the legacy of visionary artist Loïe Fuller (1862-1928)—a pioneer of modern dance and performance technology—into environmental performance practices. Since 2022, Sperling and company are the Eco-Artist-in-Residence at The New York Society for Ethical Culture. They have toured nationally and internationally, most recently on a 3-city tour of Egypt.
Website: https://www.timelapsedance.com/
Time Lapse Dance’s Yard residency is funded in part by the Jerome A. and Estelle R. Newman Assistance Fund.
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance: Communi-tree Dance Workshop at Yard Studio - July 9
All are welcome! No prior dance experience necessary.
An accessible movement workshop that facilitates embodied connections between ourselves and the natural world. We draw inspiration from the way trees collaborate via the “wood-wide-web” to form intricate, multi-species societies. Participants will practice rooting, standing tall, branching out, and forging new connections. The workshop culminates with Jody and company teaching a movement sequence from their dance Arbor.
Class Times:
Wednesday, July 9 | 11 am
The Yard Studio, Chilmark
Registration Required. 90 minutes
REGISTRATION OPENS APRIL 24
Community Popup Performance & Presentation - July 13 - West Tisbury Center, 11:30 am
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance will activate Island residents and visitors with a popup performance, presented by The Yard in close partnerships with the First Congregational Church, the Field Gallery and the West Tisbury Library.
The climate emergency is real and overwhelming. To help us grapple with life in the anthropocene, we deploy dance to awaken the senses to atmospheric change, to confront our climate grief, to build community around climate resilience and to facilitate action. We have to stop thinking of climate change as only happening “out there,” as in the melting Arctic or the burning Amazon, but as a phenomenon that is drastically changing our own habitats wherever we live. Ecokinetics, a dance practice that focuses on the relationship between human movers and natural systems, is our way of entering this reckoning. We do this through residencies, site activations and climate performances.
-from www.timelapsedance.com/dance-climate-change