New York can sometimes become overbearing. There is so many things to do, yet so little time. We try to get by, but the challenges seem never ending. Our next artist recognizes this reality and plans to display empathy using her body. During the festival, she will ask you to share a burden, then carry it for you to provide relief. There is nothing better than seeing a body of work , so to speak, that could also be therapeutic. We are excited to have Corinne Cappelletti to join the us this year, after hearing about Art in Odd Places during the Festival of Ideas last May.
How exactly will Corinne and her team going to carry your burden? The answer is below
AiOP: Tell us about you?
CC: I make dances in public spaces that alter the function and feeling of spaces. Often audience and performer interact with the environment, bringing unlikely people together. Through personal perspectives and perception of the self and the environment, I build performances to connect people to place.
AiOP: How did you hear about Art in Odd Places?
CC: I found the AIOP booth at the Festival for New Ideas this Spring where I was introduced to Lucia. After speaking with her and going to the website from previous years, I realized that I had to become a participant.
AiOP: Walk us through your thought process in creating your piece for Art in Odd Places.
CC: When I thought about my relationship to 14th Street, I thought about schlepping my belongings throughout the city from the studio to work, to the grocery story, and an evening obligation before returning home. As a primary freeway stretching across Manhattan, 14th street is a busy transitory and yet, productive atmosphere. Too much of my time is occupied by organizing and re-organizing my time and my route. It is exhausting. My sense of New York City is wrapped up in the whirlwind of errands, meetings and events. I take in my surroundings in soundbites, at the pace of my road bike on which I speed rapidly through the city. I want to stop and connect through walking, through sharing the burdens that we endure to be here. There are small burdens that happen on a daily basis and bigger burdens in life that I bring with me. I want to use my performance ritual as a platform to listen, be inspired, share and potentially transcend the personal histories and daily encounters of people who live and work on 14th street.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/28278398 w=400&h=300]
Carry you burdens by Corinne Cappelletti AiOP October 2011 from Corinne Cappelletti on Vimeo.
AiOP:How is the preparation coming along?
CC: First, I am creating a map of locations along 14th where I have interviewed someone about a burden. I have completing the interviews with participants and mapped these as icons of 14th street, which will be stopping points during our performance procession. The pastor, Father Rubio at the Church of our Lady of Gaudaloupe, and Joshua Suzann who owns Rags A GoGo, are two of the landmarks. This week I plan to talk with Ahmed, a halal food vender/professional photographer (when its not lunch hour with line of costumers). I created movement profiles out of the video and audio footage, this was my source material for the choreography. Then, I developed movement and improvisation scores along with the four performers. We will start rehearsing on site this Friday, Sept 2nd. The material will really begin take form as we deal with the public interaction and physical sites! So far we have worked on-site once. Two of the performers went on site with me to work with some beginning material and perform for a photo shoot for our project. Going into intimate spaces with people and listening to people share personal difficulties and obstacles has been a moving experience.
AiOP: Where will see you along 14th street during the festival?
CC: We are going to perform along 14th street, from the Highline Park to Ave B. There are 9/10 landmarks to our route where we stop and perform according to the people and burden that is being embodied. Anywhere along the route when we encounter a burden small or large, we stop to describe the surrounding burdens and how they affect us emotionally and physically. A map of the landmark points and the corresponding name and burden will be available soon.
AiOP: What do you hope to bring to the festival?
CC: I hope to offer a transcendent experience for the performers and the participants over the course of a ten day embodied performance procession. I will push my self and my performers beyond our tolerance for emotional and physical effort with the intention to bond more deeply with the place, the people and community of 14th street. By heightening the awareness of people on the street through physical encounter, performative voice and movement, and I hope to forge new connections, to break down barriers, and to celebrate our sameness and our difference through th sharing the burdens we carry. I attempt to use conversation, movement, and ritual as a tool for alleviating the burdens we carry, and to help people transcend them.
AiOP: Any message to the people who will be in 14th street during the festival?
CC: You can view excerpts from the rehearsal process and the source interviews, which are being integrated into the performance map of burdens called “Carry your Burdens.” The intention of Carry your Burdens is to engage in empathy through endurance, metaphor, and performance. Traversing Manhattan from west to east in the morning we perform at nine destination points, landmarks where a personal burden was shared. At dusk we return to the Hudson River carrying one another and the burdens we’ve embodied. When the performers encounter another person bearing a burden, they stop to feel, see, and describe it. The duets transcend elements of physical fatigue but also the emotional exhaustion of carrying the burdens of 14th Street. Expanding the map into performance, burdens are lifted. More information can be found at: http://newped.wordpress.com
AiOP: Are you currently working on other projects / Talk to us about your previous work
CC: Throughout the summer, I have been performing regularly out of public spaces tethered to walls and punctuated by bright bicycle helmets with two other dancers: Laura Bartczack and Hilary Chapman. We explore the spaciousness of sound in movement and relationship. By use of binaural beats, memory of the quality of touch and choreographic structures of repetition we transform the architecture of space. Alive in the music they shift with precision from stillness into fierce abandon. We propose Sound as process, Sound as material and Sound as mood to listen, alert in performance as practice. The ground becomes the wall and sound becomes the hand. We are called The Framers. We shift, frame, and manipulate sound and space.
Most recently I performed a new version of my public community development dance project, The New Pedestrian in Aix en Provence, France. This was a collaboration with photographer, Ed White. In May, I performed/collaborated with Lindsey Drury at the University of the Streets and St Marks/Dancespace. Previously I produced, choreographed, and performed a series of Meal-as-Performance events in collaboration with GoGoVertigoat Dance Project, which I co-directed for two years. These appeared in private lofts, at Governor’s Island for FIGMENT, The Dixon Place, 3rd Ward, and Dance New Amsterdam, among others.
For the past 3 months I have been developing a Body-Based Improvisational Workshop series called IMPRINT. I co-teach/design it with my friend, Eva Perotta of Nu Dance Theater (France/NYC). This workshop teaches specific types of touch to access particular body systems, such as the skeletal system or the fluid system, in order to facilitate a different state of being/feeling/thinking. We explore the imprint, both in terms of the residual state of mind/body and the re-patterning of the nervous system, through movement and improvisation.
Thank you, Corinne! Keep an eye on her starting October 1. The Art in Odd Places Program guide will be out soon. Keep checking the blog for more details
