Read Tom Philips review of Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance’s performance at Amsterdam Eco/Arts Festival
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance and The Columbus-Amsterdam BID present the Amsterdam Eco/Arts Festival as a celebration of Park(ING) Day, an annual global event where people transform spaces usually inhabited by cars into public places for people. This FREE program offers a community planting, dance and music performances, art, poetry, family workshops, games, and much more.
SCHEDULE*
12-12:30 - Walking tour of tree beds. Meet at SW corner 110/Amsterdam.
12:30-2pm - Community Planting, Love Your Street Tree Day & Col-Amst BID
12:30-1:30 - jill Sigman/thinkdance, installation build for To Mend
12:30-5pm - Capucine Bourcart, The Blanket installation
1-1:30pm - Harmony by Karate family lesson
2-2:15pm - Native New York Orientation/Poetry, Oleana Whispering Dove
2:15-2:45pm - jill sigman/thinkdance, performance To Mend
3pm - Treaty Between Self and Earth (open)
3:05pm - Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance (TLD)
3:45pm - Treaty Between Self and Earth (close)
4-4:30pm - Zumba by Marianel Marquez/BeFITNYC
4:30-6:30pm - Sonny Daze jazz trio
*subject to change. Please check back for updates.
Please protect yourself and your community by observing social distancing and mask-wearing when appropriate.
The afternoon kicks off at noon with Melissa Elstein of “Love Your Street Tree Day” and Peter Arndtsen and Michael Gonzelez of The Columbus-Amsterdam BID leading a tree bed educational walking tour from 106-110 Streets, followed by a planting demonstration. Volunteers can sign up to help beautify and plant along the neglected stretch the Minerva Bernadino Greenstreet with native flowers. Sign up HERE or email BID for more info.
At 3pm Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance (TLD) presents new ecologically-centered work. “Plastic Harvest,” a collaboration between choreographer Jody Sperling and composer Matthew Burtner, investigates plastic pollution. Radically transformed by costuming fashioned from hundreds of plastic bags, the dancers (Anika Hunter, Maki Kitahara, and Andrea Trager) appear as plastic creatures foraging and frolicking in their street habitat. The dance creates a surreal spectacle while provoking contemplation about the beauty of that—and who—our society throws away. Following, TLD presents excerpts of other works including “Arboreal Entanglement,” exploring the relationship between people and trees, performed by Sperling with music by Burtner and “Bunhead’s Back,” about what it’s like to feel different.
TLD’s performance is bookended by excerpts from “Treaty Between Earth and Self,” an interdisciplinary poetry-music-theater-dance project composed by N. Scott Johnson in development by Rattlestick Theater. This piece is an introspective journey into an Amazonian-inspired world and explores the sounds of Brazilian Forró. (Directed by Danilo Gambini with poetry by Colin Greer, percussion by Victor Caccese, vocals by Alice Reys, and choreography by Sperling.)
At 2pm, Oleana Whispering Dove, a Tsalagi-Algonquian Native American and Indigenous historian, will offer a Native New York Orientation providing information about the Native history of the festival site. Following, Oleana will read her Dream Catcher poetry about the legend of the Tsalogi Water Spider, an iconic female animal spirit.
jill sigman/thinkdance shares “To Mend” is an iterative durational process of organizing and dancing with ceramics—a meditation on brokenness and how we will put the pieces together anew. In this part-performance part-installation, Jill will carefully and caringly arrange a set of handmade ceramic shards into a structure that can be played like an instrument. There will be building and unbuilding, sounding and silence, movement and stillness, in this reflection on slowness, loss, and repair, both personal and structural.
In parallel throughout the afternoon, artist Capucine Bourcart performs her installation “The Blanket,” in which she knits plastic “thank you” bags together.
The program concludes with the local rhythms of Sonny Daze, a Latin jazz trio with performers Salvador Merced, JojoSoul, and Armando Duchesne.
Throughout the day, All Street Journal provides participatory socially-conscious muralling for children. Harmony by Karate offers a family workshop (1:30pm) and Marianel Marquez of BeFitNYC offers a free Zumba class (4pm). The festival will also have civic and community engagements, including a presence by Stop-the-Chop a NYC-based grassroots organization advocating for the cessation of non-essential helicopter flights to reduce noise and pollution and promote public health.
Amsterdam Eco/Arts Festival is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by LMCC.