Dance Theatre Etcetera's performance projects engage with sites, animating public space and fostering dialogue on important local issues.
DTE Executive Director Martha Bowers's site-specific performances played a central role in the foundation of the organization, leading to its investment in local youth through arts education and introducing the organization to the NYC community.
In 2007, developer Greg O'Connell (The O'Connell Organization) recognized the key role these performances had played in ongoing urban renewal efforts in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and provided DTE with its office/studio space on the Red Hook waterfront.
From 2003 to 2010, DTE presented the acclaimed site-specific dance production Angels and Accordions at Green-Wood Cemetery. In June 2010, DTE was honored with a Certificate of Merit from the Municipal Art Society of New York that recognizes “people, places, organizations and momentous events that have, in our view, made an exceptional contribution to the life of New York City.” DTE was nominated for the award by Alison Tocci, President of Time Out, Inc.
DTE’s award winning site-specific projects have served as important opportunities for advanced dance and theatre students to take part in professional productions as part of their learning process.
Angels and Accordions
The Dream Life of Bricks
Safe Harbour/Cork
Home Wisdom
Safe Harbor
Oasis
Blue Train
Angels and Accordions
2003-2010
Conceived and choreographed by Martha Bowers
Music: Guy Klucevsek and Bob Goldberg
Visual Installation: Alexander Heilner
Part walking tour, part performance, part guided meditation through the beautiful and richly historical Green-Wood Cemetery, Angels and Accordions was produced by Dance Theatre Etcetera and The Green-Wood Historic Fund, and presented as part of openhousenewyork's annual celebration of New York City architecture and design.
Angels and Accordions took thousands of visitors through Green-Wood's beautiful rolling hills and inside its otherwise-closed-and-locked mausoleums. Along the way, images of "Angels" in stirring tableaux vivant merged with the natural landscape and statuary of the cemetery. A number of largescale choregraphed movement pieces punctuated the performance, accompanied throughout by a chorus of accordions, as visitors explored the permanent resting ground of notables from Leonard Bernstein to Jean-Michel Basquiat to Boss Tweed. View a video of Angels and Accordions in performance.
The Dream Life of Bricks
2002
Conceived, written and directed by Martha Bowers
Music: Philip Hamilton
Set Design: Ed King
Lighting Design: Larry Smallwood
Production Manager: Larry Smallwood
Commissioned by MASS MoCA with support from the Rockefeller M.A.P Fund and the Mary Flagler Cary Live Music for Dance Program.
Produced by Dance/Theatre/Etcetera in collaboration with MASS MoCA.
In 2001, Martha Bowers received Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA)'s first performing arts commission to create THE DREAM LIFE OF BRICKS. The work was performed at MASS MoCA in June 2002. If a building could dream, what would those dreams look like? Martha Bowers' visionary choreographic historyscape of the MASS MoCA mill-turned-museum posed this question, and explored the site as the repository of 200 years of the community's collective aspirations and imaginings. This project was a collaboration with lauded musician Philip Hamilton and the members of the North Adams community.
Safe Harbour/Cork
2001
Conceived and Directed by Martha Bowers with Michael O'Byrne
Music: Tiye Giraud
Produced in collaboration withThe Institute for Choreography and Dance (ICD) at Firkin Crane and the Cork Midsummer Festival.
"...one of the most obvious community bonding elements in Cork's Midsummer Festival. An unusual fusion of procession, pageant and performance"(an) affirmation of this unique neighborhood." - THE IRISH TIMES.
Safe Harbor, first performed in 1998 on the Red Hook Brooklyn waterfront, looked at New York's immigrant history from the perspective of this blue collar waterfront community. After two years of project development in Ireland, SAFE HARBOR was successfully transplanted to Cork, the ancestral home of many Red Hook Irish immigrants. A unique blend of pageant, procession and performance, SAFE HARBOUR/CORK celebrated the historic neighborhood of Shandon in Cork City. An afternoon of street based entertainment brought local musicians, story-tellers, clowns and youth theatre groups together with American dancers and musicians. The festivities commenced with a procession lead by a giant replica of the famed Goldie Fish, a much beloved Shandon landmark. The event concluded with a sold-out, evening dance performance in the theatre at ICD. This sister project to SAFE HARBOR/RED HOOK- explored the impact years of emigration has had on the Shandon community and how it is changing as a racially diverse wave of new immigrants have arrived, many seeking asylum from political repression in their native countries.
Home Wisdom
2000 Conceived and Directed by Martha Bowers
Sound Design and Musical Direction: Mark McCoin
Produced in collaboration with Deborah Reshotko and SPEAKING OF DANCE.
Funded by Artists and Communities:America Creates for the Milennium, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Denver history fused with the city's present-day scene through the unlikely bedfellows of local architecture and contemporary dance. Choreographer Martha Bowers explored the changing values of the West by interviewing local residents about their dreams and fears of change, and translated these vignettes into a site-specific performance under the common theme of HOME WISDOM. Looking for a metaphor for transmitting values, knowledge, and experiences across generations, Bowers and Speaking of Dance Artistic Director, Deborah Reshotko, decided to base the HOME WISDOM performance in a house with a colorful history.
HOME WISDOM combined a conventional tour of a turn-of-the-century mansion, the Grant-Humphreys Mansion, with performances in various rooms of the house. Victorian Grande Dames led tours of the Mansion. As the tours went from room to room, the audience experienced site-specific scenes, popping up like dreams among the formal surroundings. The main floor reception room was devoted to "Brides Descending a Staircase," in which brides paraded up, and sometimes fell down, the house's main staircase. A local livestock auctioneer called out bids for wedding values such as loyalty and trust. In the dining room, a grizzly bear shared a meal with a Victorian woman. Upstairs in the nursery, with pillows strewn on the floor for the audience to relax on, a nanny read a bedtime story and offered a lullaby. Denver composer, Mark McCoin was the musical director and sound designer for the event. Two nights of sold-out performances took place in October 2000.
Safe Harbor
1998-1999
Conceived and Directed by Martha Bowers
Music by Tiye Giraud
SAFE HARBOR II was commissioned by the Taipei Theater and the Mulberry Street Theatre as an original site-specific work adapted for the stage. It was presented at the Taipei Theatre in the Spring of 1999 in Midtown Manhattan.
"A refreshingly unslick yet breathtaking production." - THE BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE
Co-produced by Dance/Theatre/Etcetera and Dancing in the Streets. A site-specific event created for the waterfront of Red Hook, Brooklyn. This evening length event explored the immigrant history of this waterfront community. Audience members were led along the waterfront and through the cobbled streets of Red Hook, as performers danced and sang from floating stages, on jetties and boats. SAFE HARBOR had a cast of over 40 people which included a community choir, professional dancers and musicians, local community members as well as the boats and crews of Floating the Apple- an organization that builds and rows replicas of the historic "whitehall gigs" (25 ft. row boats) with New York City youth.
Oasis
1997
Commissioned by Dancing in the Streets On-Site New York City program
Produced by Dance/Theatre/Etcetera
Conceived and Directed by Martha Bowers
Music by Ralph Denzer
OASIS was a live dance and music performance that toured NYC's community gardens in 1997, drawing attention to the Gardens' battle with the City to preserve their spaces.
A live brass band, blues singer, six dancers and a puppeteer traveled throughout NYC performing in community garden spaces. Pre-performance workshops were conducted in each location to incorporate neighborhood youth into the performance.
Performances were held at the Warren Street Garden, The Westside Community Garden, The Garden Pier, The Pleasant Village Community Garden, and the East New York Garden.
Blue Train
1997
Conceived and Directed by Martha Bowers and John King
Music by John King
Co-produced by Dance/Theatre/Etcetera
and the Wagon Train Project in Lincoln, Nebraska.
BLUE TRAIN was a site-specific event which began in the Wagon Train Performance Loft and proceeded to take audience members on a tour of the adjacent rail yards in Lincoln, Nebraska.
This evening length work explored the impact of the trains on diverse sectors of Lincoln's population. Over a two year period, Dance/Theatre/Etcetera members traveled to Lincoln to conduct workshops and research the history of the region. The cast of the final production included traditional drummers and singers from the Omaha Tribe, dancers from the Lakota Sioux tribe, retired railroad workers, local artists and youth as well as the professional dancers from Dance/Theatre/Etcetera.
A documentary about the making of BLUE TRAIN was created by Lincoln filmmaker John Spence and Martha Bowers. BLUE TRAIN: MAKING HISTORY DANCE was broadcast on Nebraska Public Television and was selected as a featured film in the 2000 Dance on Camera Film Festival in New York City.
Order the film here.
