Erika Farkvam, Katie Rutterer, Kimi Eisele. Photo by Larry Hanelin
Adaptations was a performance about change, making do, and reinvention. Performed in April 2010, it featured dancing on bicycles, live music from members of Batucaxé Afro-Brazilian Drumming and Dance Ensemble, and work by Renee Blakeley, Kimi Eisele, Lisa Marie McFarlane, Tammy Rosen, and Katie Rutterer , as well as by former NEW ART dancer Amanda Hamp of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and Yarrow King, dance director of Batucaxé, Tucson’s Afro-Brazilian Drumming and Dance Ensemble.
The show was a direct response to the dismal state of economic and environmental affairs (budget cuts to arts and education, global financial insecurity, and over-consumption of finite natural resources in the desert and beyond). As a small arts organization, we wondered: How do we keep going? How do we change and adapt?
Of course, as dancers we are always responding to changing circumstances by moving or rotating or shifting our weight. As performers, we adapt to uneven surfaces, bright stage lights, technical difficulties. We’ve always been good at doing what we do with very little monetary reward. How do we adapt? We lift up and lean on each other. We fall in love with our bicycles again. We learn new styles and forms. We change the music. We move.