By Biborka Beres

CLIMATE VISION

This is the second part of a three-part interview with Rulan Tangen, founder of Dancing Earth. You can read Part I here.

Do you have a climate vision? Is there an overall message you would like to convey with your dances?

I started with a creative, intercultural vision. Now I listen for what wants and needs to be spoken at this time. Right now, we’re understanding this through the lens of the climate crisis. People of color across the globe, most particularly Indigenous Peoples, have already seen the destruction of their way of life and suffered cultural devastation. 1492 is a pretty good starting date for that. Since then, we’ve been doing our best to adapt and be resilient. That includes people of the Pacific archipelago, the archipelago known colonially as the Pacific Islands – my mother’s people and ancestors. 

People who are surrounded by water are incredibly vulnerable. On my father’s side, the lineage goes to Norway and Ireland. One could say that in Europe, oppression – in the form of witch trials that silenced women and crushed their intuition – started  even before 1492. What is now the climate crisis comes from these attacks on all these different ways of knowing and being in relation to the natural world. 

So, when you ask about my vision, it’s a huge question. What is the overall message? It is pluralistic, adaptive, resilient, and I can see three principles that have come through since we began working.

These principles will continue to move us, even though Dancing Earth is transforming right now due to COVID and the recent calls for social justice that ask who gets to use the term “Indigenous.” We’re transforming to meet these questions in the most responsible way, while honoring the gifts that we all have to give, including my own. Certain things might fall away, but what I believe will continue is the origins of me laying in a hospital bed, hoping there would be three principles.

One of these principles is that all of life is connected. We’re all part of this life force, this ecosystem. We can see it in the first 10 years of our dances, when we were dancing more often in the form of plants or the four elements than in the form of  human beings. This was to deepen our understanding of the life force that is in all. We often get caught in our human stories and our personal stories, which are important, but I was drawn to how we can embody the wind as a force of change, for example, and how that manifests in a human way. I thought I understood that all forms of art and life are connected when I was 20 – and then a year later, 10 years later, 15 years later, that understanding gets deeper and deeper. What you do and why, who’s involved, how you’re involving them…. Understanding that is a life’s journey.

The second principle for making our work is that beauty should be created out of whatever we have. I went into dancing looking for what I had experienced in my career being a full-time, paid dancer, in a grid studio, touring the world. I wanted these opportunities for everyone. With Dancing Earth, it was more like: okay, we don’t have a dance studio, we’re dancing in the parking lot. Or: we don’t have money for costumes, so I’m going to cut up little t-shirts and we’re going to look at forms and designs that come from the dancers, from pre-colonial, pre-Colombian ancestors, and cut up these little t-shirts and paint them in those forms, reclaiming those designs. 

The idea that what we have is enough is huge. It means thinking, “Oh, if only we could have real costumes”, and then starting to understand this lack as being eco-conscious. It was through the water theme, which was initially given to me by Oddish Navi grandmothers, that I found out about the toxicity of the fashion world. I’d been wearing secondhand clothes all my life. I love beauty. I love lines. I love colors. Yet, I aspired for something better. Then I realized that there was nothing better than not producing waste and not being greedy.

The interesting thing about dance is that it’s the one thing you can always do; I was dancing in the hospital bed with just my fingers. Because it’s with your body, it is the most basic, but also the most collaborative art form. It can involve music and poetry, costuming and architecture in the form of set design and lighting. Our dances can include food offerings and interactivity: people make little balls out of clay filled with wildflower seeds that get thrown. These seeds grow into wildflowers that attract butterflies and bees, which bring pollen the next season to create food.

The third very important principle, which is related to the first two, is that diversity is how we can thrive. Diversity and inclusion. They’re big buzzwords right now, and that’s good. Many creatives working at the grassroots level, who were under-recognized before, have now received some recognition. But for years, we didn’t even have food or funds to pay dancers. We met farmers who gave us food and showed us how plants grow together, and these became choreographies we honored the farmers with. The ways that marginalized artist groups create and adapt might become models. I’m interested in what brings us together, what the rhythm is. Whether it’s the rhythm of the moon or the heartbeat. And I am just as interested in what makes us different. The version that I as a choreographer often enjoy of what’s called unison movement is very different from what it is in my trained dance background, which, at its peak, is people of the same height, with the same body type moving at the same moment in the same gesture. That’s incredible and wonderful to see on a big scale. But I’m also interested in seeing the way grass moves with the wind, where it’s a little different with each blade of grass. Sometimes that might look a little messy to someone who is looking for something very precise. 

In fact, we’ll be shifting how we describe Dancing Earth to call it intercultural. This is to include native, global Indigenous, and mixed cultures that aren’t recognized as Indigenous by any federal institution. It is to acknowledge self-definition of peoples with relationships and creation stories connected to land and waters, whether they’re called Indigenous or not, and people who are disconnected from those stories. 

You mentioned life force and that everything is life. Is climate change, in that sense, this life force turning on itself? Since there is so much destruction…

Some of it is overproduction. That’s greed-based. How we counter greed is by understanding that what we have is enough. How do we counter overproduction? That’s at the expense of diversity. We want a certain kind of thing. We get rid of all of these trees because we want that thing only. How can we do that if we respect each form of life? There’s scarcity and suffering from some because others have too much. That is a basic imbalance. 

I think there’s power in telling the truths of what has happened to our communities. I remember hearing about fracking, but then a Canadian dancer came in to say, this is what’s happened in our community because of it. Wealth comes, but suddenly people are sick and we don’t have water from the tap anymore. To hear that  moves us from the intellectual sphere, from knowing that this seems wrong, to the heart and the spirit and the body, towards a visceral response. 

Interestingly, that’s not the part Elders want me to share through dance. They’re like, yeah, if the young people need to tell that. But we know that part. We’re living it, we’re suffering from it. What is needed is hope and remembering the beauty, the balance, the way of diversity and respect, the way of kindness and welcoming. We have so much energy for what we are against. But when it’s time to articulate what we are for, it’s harder. That’s where dance can be very, very powerful. 

There are so many different strategies of artistic creation, whether or not we use words. And if we do, what languages are they in? I actually love dance because of what it says in our minds. We work in imagery and feeling and sensation. Abstractions and approximations. The minute you use words, it all becomes very precise. In a way, dance is the transmission of energy in everything that’s missing. When you receive through certain kinds of witnessing of dance, it’s like an energy wave goes through you. You search for words. It’s beautiful. 

Then, there’s the power of visual imagery. It sticks with me. I dream about it. It’s imprinting. And when you need something specific, when a very specific theme has been given to you, then you have to use words to translate it. And if you’re with a primarily English speaking audience, you might choose English. Or, with our Southwest group, there were multiple languages. Those languages were integrated into the soundscape, and our bodies became interpreters. We were literally a large embodied sign language moving those images into specific forms for a more focused message.

That resonates a lot with me, with how I found dance. I’ve been moving a lot from words and theory to embodiment, and it’s an ongoing process for sure. I don’t think it’s about losing either words or body, but about their coexistence and incorporating them into each other.

I seem to always think in binary: “I’m in the head too much”, “I’m only in the body, I don’t do this intellectually”… We can pull all those together. This integration, this weaving together is actually a really potent area for new ways of understanding the world.

Even then I feel like I’m only understanding the theory I learned in the beginning of my studies through embodiment. 

There are times when the overall message you want to convey comes from the vision, intellectual concept, or stories that have been shared. Then, there’s this other entity that is hard to describe because it’s beyond words. It is a way of knowing and understanding that actually comes in through the physical process. Sometimes we don’t know what to do with that. We ask ourselves, “How is this even relevant?” What I keep saying is to trust our intuition and to trust our bodies, and we’ll find ways to bring it forth. It often finds its way into a ritual. And a week later in a dream, or a month later, or 10 years later, we find out what that thing was.

Many people around the world have origin stories that trace back to the stars. In recent years, science has caught up to this way of knowing that has been transmitted through beautiful stories – stories that were easy to remember because they were so compelling. All of life on earth comes from the heart of dying stars. We’re literally made from the carbon of stars. That’s another manifestation of how we are all related – through stardust. So, the stories, right? The stories were actually true; they were not mythology. They’re a way of knowing. Now we can say: here’s the science behind them. The stories do not just have to do with the past, but with allowing our bodies and imaginations to be conduits for intuition. Because they may be a way of conveying knowledge that we can’t get from any other source.

In the third part of this interview, we discuss the relationship between dance and science. 

(Top image: Rulan Tangen, Photo by Joe McNally.)

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Biborka Beres is a senior student at Bennington College in Vermont, USA, studying dance, drama and philosophy. Her interests and works lie at the intersection of socio-political change and the performing arts. In her interviews for the Artists & Climate Change blog, she is continuing her process of exploring how the arts can create models, practices and imaginary worlds which allow humans to coexist peacefully with nature and with each other.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Biborka Beres

RITUAL

Rulan Tangen is the founding artistic director of Dancing Earth, a company that creates contemporary dance and related arts through Indigenous and intra-cultural relationships centered in ecological and cultural diversity. Dancing Earth collaborates with artists, farmers, cultural advisors, and activists. They create eco-dance productions under the guidance of Elders who suggest appropriate themes – such as diversity or sacred land and water – that support the health and wellness of all people and the planet.

This is Part I or a three-part interview.

The word ritual came up a lot when I was discovering your work. Are rituals important to you? How do they relate to the mission of protecting the climate and the Earth?

I want to thank you for the opportunity to bring another texture to the story of myself and Dancing Earth. The origin story does have a lot to do with ritual. Any roots and seeds lead to a particular moment in time.

You can say that the origins of dancing go back to when I was born, or before that. At a fairly young age, I went through a stage 4 battle with cancer. It was quite likely due to living in poor environmental conditions, which are part of the legacy for marginalized people of color. I wasn’t aware of all of that; I was just trying to live. In a sense, Dancing Earth was a vision of a ritual of everyday gratitude for my life.

Who I wanted to have as the first circle of beneficiaries were people who had incredible talent and vision and ways of knowing, but who did not have opportunity or access to the performing arts. These were people I had met in my career dancing and teaching in many places, including in rural reservations. They were Native Americans and global Indigenous people, including mixed people with these heritages. The performing arts can be a conduit for visibility, but I hadn’t stepped forward to do that fully because of so many protections around what can be shared. 

A few years before the cancer journey, a woman from the Lakota Nation who had adopted me – my adopted grandmother – gave me permission to move forward with certain things. We had conversations about what would be relevant to share, so it’s almost like the cancer journey became an incubation period. Then, some of the young kids who had been students were ready to make this their full-time vocation. 

As far as ritual goes, what I was bringing in was the idea of taking responsibility as contemporary, modern-day people, to create rituals relevant to this moment. There have always been ceremonial songs and dances, visual imagery and oratory that would come together to form rituals of transformation – these are the origins of theatre in all cultures. Some of the participants in the group were part of cultures that had retained this direct connection, and others were revitalizing it. But when we come together as an inter-tribal or intercultural group, there are many ceremonies which are not appropriate to share; they are made for a particular group that share a language and a geography or season.

For example, one of the first dancers in the company is also an accomplished violinist. We had to think about evolving a form that didn’t necessarily have a European influence, since that had been so heavily prioritized. I myself was blessed to have a career in ballet and modern dance, but I wanted to consider whether it was these forms that needed to be on stage. Should they be in a circle? With a violin, we were looking at references to ancient string instruments and found that they represent the wind. The violinist first portrayed a whirlwind, which was circular, and it brought out his Capoeira proficiency; his mother comes from a line of Brazilian Indigenous people from the Amazons. Capoeira is part of his cultural and creative heritage. The sound of the violin was considered a representation of this whirlwind, which is a conduit for change. Like this, we went deeper into why and how we were bringing certain things into the creative process.

In every dance I ever made, where artists come together, is what I call sacred space. That space of creation and visioning brings in something that doesn’t exist yet, even if it’s a known art form or a story being retold. It also brings in a plurality of perspectives where everybody is valued and respected. 

I want to be conscious of the fact that there are ceremonies which still exist and have existed for thousands of years – and often what they need is protection. On the other hand, things come up that need a statement. We brought our water dances to various protests. Very different thinkers and performance artists have applied the word ritual to things like brushing your teeth every day. It carries a sense of openness towards the idea of a ritual, but we certainly invest in our rituals with the intention of transformation, including of the people who witness or participate. 

The word ritual is quite open-ended, and could be considered an invitation.

Yes, invitation and openness are very centered in my work. I wanted Dancing Earth to be respectful, cautious, and protective – waiting for permissions or taking gentle steps. I was a successful dancer working in New York and around the world. I was happy being a conduit for other’s visions. If anything, I was too intimidated to create choreography or to be a director. Then, when I went through that life-changing battle, I couldn’t dance. I could barely move. I was no longer able to be a conduit, but I definitely had dreams. When I share those with others, they become choreography and direction. Yet, I am still being a conduit for something greater than myself – there’s definitely something coming through me. It is shaped by me because it’s choosing my body to flow through. When we come in the circle, we always have a sense of what is in the middle and wants to be birthed through our process.

Is this a different source than someone else? Maybe a collective thing, or something non-human?

That’s a great question. We’ve been creating for 17 years, so there are many variations to this.

For me, it was coming through an intangible way of relating to the tangible. It’s about understanding life on Earth. It’s not about some other realm, but about the spirit and force that is in all of life. Variations – particular images or glimpses of that – would come through me and I’d bring them into the circle for other people to respond. 

When we started, we didn’t have a shared movement language. No school told us, here’s how to move. I had received 10,000 hours of training with a particular group to get to that perfect, refined choreographic language. There was a bit of an urgency – I had been given life for who knows how long. 

After a few years, there were a surprising and continued number of instances when Native Elders, specifically grandmothers from the Anishinaabe nation,  or a man who had a group from inter-tribal Southwestern nations, would come to us and say, “What you’re doing is important because it’s a way to transmit messages. Here’s a message we have. It is really important. Could you take that and make dances?” In one case, it was about water; in another, about seeds and plants, and how we make food. Each one of those dances has lasted and continues to impact our work. These aren’t projects that are ever done. It feels very different when someone gifts me with a story. They are not always stories that I need to tell, but themes that are given for which I hold respect. Often, they are given because they need to reach far and wide. In other cases I am asked to present them there, in the community, with the youth and Elders, with a particular language group. Afterwards, I can let them go to other places and each of those places and peoples can receive those themes and respond in their own ways. At Dancing Earth, we have a responsibility when we’ve been trusted to carry these stories. 

What you’re saying reminds me of movement, not only movement itself as a dance in some form, but also how the form moves, shifts, and changes.

You have just scratched upon a theme that came out of our work, which I call MOMB, like womb: the movement of movement building. Our first workshops when we recognized this notion were in the Bay area. Sometimes you do things for years and then you realize there’s a pattern and you give the pattern a name. We got the movement of movement building from the different practices and processes that we as artists, humans, and humanists come up with: ways to bring our message forward and adapt that message so it is relevant to every place, time, and people. It shifts like water. Our choreographic motifs come from very specific stories or socio-political intentions. There’s a relationship between what we present on stage in full ritual, and the qualities of light and timing and music. Then we take some of that same material and it morphs and changes for an action against pipelines on the steps of the Capitol, for example. They’re all different tactics towards an energy shift.

Thank you, Rulan.

In the second part of this interview, we discuss Rulan’s climate vision.

(Top image: Rulan Tangen, founder of Dancing Earth.)

______________________________

Biborka Beres is a senior student at Bennington College in Vermont, USA, studying dance, drama and philosophy. Her interests and works lie at the intersection of socio-political change and the performing arts. In her interviews for the Artists & Climate Change blog, she is continuing her process of exploring how the arts can create models, practices and imaginary worlds which allow humans to coexist peacefully with nature and with each other.

———-

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mary Woodbury 

This month we travel to a fictional island in Jamaica – Bajacu – to talk with author Diana McCaulay, whose novel Daylight Come was published in September 2020.

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a grueling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach 40 are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less sea-threatened parts of the capital.

Sorrel can take no more, and she persuades her mother, Bibi, to flee the city and head for higher ground in the interior. She has heard there are groups known as Tribals, bitter enemies of the Domins, who have found ways of surviving in the hills, but she also knows they will have to evade the packs of ferals, animals with a taste for human flesh. Not least, she knows that the sun will kill them if they can’t find shelter.

Diana McCaulay takes the reader on a tense, threat-filled odyssey as mother and daughter attempt their escape. On the way, Sorrel learns much about the nature of self-sacrifice, maternal love, and the dreadful moral choices that must be made in the cause of self-protection.

CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

Thanks so much for talking with me! How did you get started in writing?

I’m a Jamaican writer, resident on the island, and I’ve written all my life, but mostly in secret. Reading is what got me writing. I loved books and stories as a child, and I wanted to move people I would never meet with my words, as I had been moved. I’ve always had stories in my head. My father encouraged my writing as a teenager, gave me books, and talked to me seriously about them but when I declared I wanted to be a writer, he told me women could not write literature because the only suitable subject was war – and women did not go to war. I believed him, so until I was past 50, I didn’t send out my work, often didn’t even finish it. Then I had a health scare and realized that if I were to hear I was terminally ill, the only big thing I would regret about my life was not publishing a novel. 

I completed my first, Dog-Heart, sent it out and it was rejected 12 times. Peepal Tree Press, still one of my publishers, said yes, and Dog-Heart came out in 2010. I’ve written five novels in all. My second was Hurcan, also published by Peepal Tree Press; Gone to Drift, published by Papillote Press and Harper Collins US; White Liver Gal, which I self-published as an experiment – not, I would say, a successful experiment. Everyone needs an editor! My most recent novel is Daylight Come, published by Peepal Tree Press in September 2020. I also have a day job as an environmental activist. I’m the founder and director of the Jamaica Environment Trust, which is 30 years old this year. I’ve been an opinion columnist for our main daily newspaper, The Gleaner, and have also written and published many short stories and articles.

What’s going on in Daylight Come?

Daylight Come is set in 2084 on the fictional Caribbean island of Bajacu, where it has become too hot to go outside in the day due to the climate crisis. Everyone works at night and sleeps in the day, but my protagonist, a 14-year-old girl named Sorrel, can’t sleep. She convinces her mother, Bibi, to leave the known difficulties of the capital city of Bana to travel to the mountains, where Sorrel believes that temperatures must be cooler, and it’s rumored that tribes of people live together in old and more satisfying ways. Daylight Come is a fast-paced, threat-filled adventure story, as well as a story about the changing relationship between a mother and a daughter as they face many dangers together and must consider what each of them is willing to sacrifice. As for the audience, I’m convinced that the climate crisis needs stories, because talking about the science has not had sufficient impact. And although I’ve read quite a bit of climate fiction set in large countries, I wanted to write about how this could play out on a small tropical island. So Daylight Come is for Caribbean residents, visitors, and the Caribbean diaspora, adults, and young adults, as well as everyone interested in and concerned about what the climate emergency might do to our societies. It’s not a polemic, though; hopefully it’s a powerful narrative of interest to anyone who likes a good story.

Can you describe the ecological themes in your novel and how you were inspired to write about them?

Three years ago now, when I first started thinking about Daylight Come, I was in the UK and read a story about construction workers in the Middle East falling from scaffolding due to the heat. When I came home, I started noticing how many people worked outside – farmers, security guards, policemen, traffic wardens, people selling in markets and on the streets, construction and road workers – and I thought, huh, suppose all of this wasn’t possible for most of the year? What would life be like in a place like Jamaica? My premise is that human civilization evolved in a stable and nurturing climate, and without that, everything we take for granted is under threat. I’m also interested in the human impulse to acquire materials things – Daylight Come explores that a little bit – and how easily we get used to comfort and plenty and seek more and more and more.

What has been the reaction to your book, and have you been able to do many book fairs or talks during the COVID-19 pandemic?

I’ve done quite a few online events – talks, panel discussions, a launch, book clubs, readings, interviews and so on. Daylight Come was released last September and due to the pandemic, travel and in-person events were impossible. It’s never been easy for someone like me, writing outside a major literary market, to promote my books, but the current situation is really daunting. The most common thing I hear from readers is that they couldn’t put the book down. They like how fast paced it is. A few people have asked me if it was depressing to write and my answer is no, it wasn’t. As Rebecca Solnit says, the future is not yet written, and the outcomes I describe in Daylight Come are not inevitable. We humans can, if we decide to, build different and better societies. I also get asked if the things I describe in my book could really happen, and all of them have already happened – not everywhere, but somewhere. It is very hard to market a book in the pandemic. There are so many online events now that it’s hard to get attention. Distribution is also a challenge: you might market, and then apart from e-books, your book is just not available.

Are you working on anything else right now?

Yes, I’m working on a nonfiction memoir called That Woman, which is about the intersection of my environmental journey and my ancestry. I’m the descendant of a Portuguese Sephardic Jew who came to Jamaica in the late 1700s and had nine children on the island with an enslaved (and therefore raped) West African women. But I have light skin so I’ve been racialized as white. My male ancestor was born a slave but went on to enslave others. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever tried to write.

Thanks so much for sharing your story, Diana.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in Nova Scotia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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