How do we navigate constant change? Is there an ethos for living in precarity? These questions drive Noli Timere, a performance installation of off-ground choreography performed within, on, under, around - and created simultaneously with - a voluminous Janet Echelman net sculpture. Activated and transformed by six outstanding dancers, the work is a synthesis of experimental dance, avant-garde circus, engineering, sound art, kinetic sculpture and public art.
Led by choreographer Rebecca Lazier, the project brings together the science and engineering of Echelman’s awe-inspiring sculptures with the human story of the creative team’s personal connections to the oceans and environment. Establishing performance and sculpture as equal partners, Noli Timere highlights human connectivity and resilience during a time of unprecedented uncertainty.
Rebecca Lazier is a choreographer and educator based in New York City and Nova Scotia who has choreographed more than eighty works that have been presented in six countries. Recognized as an audacious experimenter, Rebecca creates dances of explosive physical vitality inspired by the thinking and innovation that is possible through collaboration. She continually reaches outside of dance towards experimental music, engineering, architecture, anatomy and visual art, and her work has increasingly emphasized the coming together of disciplinary forms in continuously adapting, emergent systems on stage and in the studio.
Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Her work defies categorization, as it intersects Sculpture, Architecture, Urban Design, Material Science, Structural & Aeronautical Engineering, and Computer Science. Echelman’s art transforms with wind and light, and shifts from being “an object you look at, into an experience you can get lost in.” Using unlikely materials - from atomized water particles to engineered fiber fifteen times stronger than steel - Echelman combines ancient craft with computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents.
The National Creation Fund’s investment of $160,000 supports an extended development period for both the indoor and outdoor versions of the work, including technical workshops and additional rehearsal time for an expanded cast of dancers.
Commissioning producer and presenter: Live Art Dance
Co-producers: Mocean Dance
Co-commissioned by Princeton University
Developed with support from the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund; Canada Council for the Arts; Arts Nova Scotia; Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, City of Halifax; Barry Onouye Studio, Architecture Department, University of Washington and Breaking Circus.
World premiere to be confirmed.
