Your donations help to keep us making dance more accessible, engaging the community, exploring critical issues through movement, and creating quality modern dance performances.
NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre is a registered 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization. Please contact us if you would like a receipt for your donation for tax purposes! Thank you for your support.
Why should you donate NOW? (From our December e-newsletter…)
This morning, I did the cliché (but nonetheless fun) thing of looking up a word in a dictionary. What word? Movement. I used Merriam Webster’s online. Here are my favorite entries:
MOVEMENT
1. the act or process of moving; especially a change of place or position or posture; action, activity.
2. tendency or trend; a series of organized activities working toward an objective; an organized effort to promote or attain an end
3. the rhythmic character or quality of a musical composition
4. particular rhythmic flow of language
5. the vibrant quality in literature that comes from elements that constantly hold a reader’s interest (as a quickly moving action-filled plot)
Motion. Action. Change. Activity. Trend. Promote. Attain. Work toward. Rhythmic. Flow. Vibrant. Interest. Nice.
That’s how I want my days to feel. How about you?
At NEW ARTiculations, our mission is movement. We make it ourselves and create opportunities for you to make it too.
Why?
Mostly because moving just plain feels good–it gets our blood flowing, it reminds us we are made of muscle and bone, it gives us energy, it brings color to our cheeks and oxygen to our lungs, it helps our heart do its loving job. At NEW ART, we also move because we believe the body can communicate ideas and concepts and emotions in ways the voice, the written word, photographs, and even moving pictures can’t always do.
We were thrilled to find some support for our beliefs in John Bohannan’s recent Ted Talk “Dance vs. Powerpoint, a Modest Proposal.” Bohannon, a science wrter, advocates using dancers in public presentations (vs. Powerpoint slideshows, yawn) about complicated subject matter. He argues, “If you’re trying to give someone the big picture of a really complex idea, to really capture its essence, the fewer words you use the better.” Bohannon believes “bad Powerpoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy,” mostly because they create the “illustion of understanding.” He proposes that as a nation, we “use dance to expalin all of our complex problems.” We like that idea. A LOT! Imagine: Dancers being employed to help physicists and molecular biologists and aerospace engineers and economists explain challenging conepts to the general pubic! Wow!
At NEW ART, we’ve been doing this kind of dance-the-complex-issues for years. From our 2006 production of “Re:Configurations” which explored the complexities and dignity of LGBT identity and relationship (to be reprised in 2012!) to our 2008 presentation of “We Are What We Eat,” about the food we eat and the systems that feed us, we’ve used dance to shed light on complicated systems, emotions, and issues.
Our current project, FLOW, uses dance and choreography to communicate information about local hydrology, our jeopardized water supply, and how we as a community can re-examine our everyday water use. In January, we’ll begin working with the Tucson-based non-profit organization, Watershed Management Group, to create our very own “dance-not-Powerpoint” presentation to communicate “green infrastructure” strategies (rainwater and stormwater harvesting combined with plant communities to improve our public spaces) to the public! Once complete, that presentation will be shared at conferences, public forums, open houses, and on stage!
That’s just one of the many ways we hope to move you in 2012 through our interactive, participatory project, FLOW. We’ve got a “monsoon” of public events for you to join in on, moving your body too! Below we share one of them and we’ll tell you the others in January!
To keep our limbs limber and our activities active, please consider supporting our movement with an end-of-the-year, tax-deductible donation to NEW ARTiculations. Do that right now, here: http://www.newarticulations.org/donate/
We’re hopeful that by involving you in our movement and with your financial support, we’ll create a whole pulsing river of compassionate, energetic, vibrant community members.
And that would be really moving.
Yours,
Kimi Eisele
Co-Director, NEW ARTiculations