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Tree Dances: becoming epiphyte – an evening with Biba Bell and dancers

Name: Tree Dances: becoming epiphyte – an evening with Biba Bell and dancers
Start: 2023-11-11T18:00:00-08:00
End: 2023-11-11T19:00:00-08:00
Location: Main Hall

November 11 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm PST

Tree Dances: becoming epiphyte – an evening with Biba Bell and dancers
Saturday, November 11, 6pm
$15 at the door
NOTALF (No one turned away for lack of funds)

Let’s become epiphyte. Let’s invite the outside in. Let’s collaborate amongst our non- and more-than-human companions. Let’s experiment with new modes of being, scaling to the tune of arboreal liveness. Epiphytes (air-plants who live in trees) offer a choreo-poetic figure who co-mingles with/in forest collectivity, and a mode of addressing one’s relationship to site distinct from parasitical properties of interruption, extraction, and noise. Where does this dance land? And, how does this dance land where? If, dancing in a forest and there is no one around, does it make a sound?

Becoming epiphyte is a performance project led by the desire to re-frame theatrical conventions focused on the dancer to include a more-than-human forest scene, to excavate the charged nature of site, which, not unlike the body, enacts social projects of remembering and forgetting, of cultivation and wildness, of access and resistance. Calling upon a history of tree and forest defenders, tree-sitters, activists, and artists, we dance to remember their teachings.

With Biba Bell, Shannon White, and Christopher Woolfolk.

Biba Bell (b. 1976, Sebastopol) is a writer, dancer, and choreographer based in Detroit. Her performance work has been shown in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Canada, and across the US. Her research interests include contemporary choreography, site-specific and experimental practice, ecosomatics, art collectives, domesticity and affective labor, public/private space, dance and architecture, and dance in visual art contexts. She has performed with Modern Garage Movement (2005-2011, 2021), Maria Hassabi (2011-2014), and Walter Dundervill (2010-2018) among others. Bell is an Associate Professor of Dance at Wayne State University and earned her Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University. Of her dancing the New York Times writes “It’s invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild.”