Artist-in-Residence Rebecca Lazier previews her new daring and captivating work NOLI TIMERE
June 22 at PS21 Pavilion
NOLI TIMERE, a soaring aerial performance-installation–eight dancers moving within, on, under, and around Janet Echelman’s voluminous floating iridescent net sculpture. Rebecca Lazier’s choreography, with an original score by cellist and composer Jorane, daringly synthesizes experimental dance, avant-garde circus, installation art, music, engineering, public sculpture, and social practice. Noli Timere (“Be not afraid,” in Latin) makes the interconnectedness of the human and natural realms visible and tangible: a change in one element has cascading effects. The work hints at urgent questions: How do we survive in a changing world, cope with instability, and live with precarity? Questions like these guide the design of Noli Timere and speak directly to our current moment.
In Noli Timere, performers move upon and within an Echelman suspended sculpture for the first time, the artists up to 25 feet in the air, a synergism wherein choreography and sculpture continually transform each other.
From May 21 to June 21, Rebecca Lazier will be in residency at PS21, workshopping NOLI TIMERE.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
REBECCA LAZIER
Rebecca Lazier is a choreographer and educator based in New York City and Nova Scotia. She has choreographed more than eighty works that have been widely performed throughout North America and Europe, and Nic Petry’s film of her Coming Together/Attica was screened at the 14th Venice Biennale. An audacious experimenter, Rebecca creates dances of explosive physical vitality informed by the thinking and innovation that result from reaching beyond dance to experimental music, engineering, architecture, visual art, and anatomy. Her work increasingly emphasizes the coming together of disciplinary forms in the studio and, notably, in performance.
Rebecca began her choreographic career collaborating with popular avant-garde composer/activist Fred Ho and two-time Tony-award-winning theater director Bartlett Sher. Other notable collaborators include scientist and MacArthur fellow Naomi Leonard; composers Daniel Trueman and Paul Lansky; new music ensembles Newspeak, Mobius, and SŌ Percussion; visual artist Janet Echelman; and dance artists Raja Feather Kelly, Cori Kresge, Jennifer Lafferty, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener.
A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Rebecca graduated from Juilliard and is currently a Professor of Practice and Associate Director of the Program in Dance at Princeton University. Her performance project There Might Be Others won a 2016 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award before touring internationally. Commissioned by New York Live Arts, this international collaboration involved 12 percussionists and 15 dancers from five countries and produced a book of intradisciplinary scores for music and movement published by Brooklyn’s Operating System Press.
JANET ECHELMAN
Janet Echelman creates monumental, fluidly mobile sculptures at the scale of buildings and city blocks that respond to wind, water, sunlight, and other environmental forces. Her work defies categorization; it intersects with sculpture, architecture, urban design, material science, structural and aeronautical engineering, and computer science. Her interest in utilizing unconventional materials for her sculptures was sparked by the fishermen’s nets she first observed on the beaches of Mahabalipuram, on the Bay of Bengal. Employing atomized water particles, engineered fiber fifteen times stronger than steel, and other materials, Echelman combines ancient craft techniques with computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for civic life on five continents.
Her sculptures, which have been compared to airborne laceworks, alter in response to the variations in light and air currents. They encourage viewers to stop, look up, and wonder, and transform neutral terrain into social spaces. On five continents—from Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai, and Santiago, to Beijing, Boston, New York, and London—with permanent works in Porto (Portugal), Gwanggyo (South Korea), Vancouver, San Francisco, West Hollywood, Phoenix, Eugene, Greensboro, Philadelphia, Seattle, Columbus (OH), and St. Petersburg (FL), the work ceases to be a mere “object you look at”; it morphs into “an experience you can get lost in.”
JORANE
Jorane is a French-Canadian singer-songwriter, cellist, and composer whose classically-informed, chamber-music approach to the cello imparts a distinctive quality to her renderings of pop and alternative songs and instrumentals. Since 1999, she has released a dozen albums and composed scores for films and plays, including Kamataki, Louis Cyr, and Le Journal d’Anne Frank. Writing in Pop Matters, Tim O’Neil called Jorane’s “combination of earthy, supple cello and ethereal female soprano . . . inspired” and added that her “prodigious talent infuses the music with an urgency and a dynamism.” Noli Timere is Jorane’s first collaboration with a choreographer and visual artist.
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