ESSENTIAL DEPARTURES

July 20-26 2015

July 18-23 2016 

 

A week of collaborative investigations into the female body and nature, in a non-judgemental and feminist environment at new rural performance-specific venue, Rosekill Farm, in upstate New York.


How can female identifying performers disrupt the essentialized notion that we embody an element of nature? While we tend to think of our bodies as automatically politicized in an urban space, how to we take that energy and perspective into a rural space?

Using an experimental and collaborative pedagogy, Essential Departures will seek to challenge our own perspectives of making work in a rural environment, whilst building relationships with one another and the land itself.

We would like to invite you to participate in a week-long performance event we are curating in Upstate New York to present current radical feminist practice within a natural setting. The event will take place at the new venue Rosekill Farm, Rosendale NY. All participating performance artists will spend the week living and working together on location.

Artists will be responding to the site with consideration of the female body’s contextual relationship to nature as a point of departure. We would like to invite you to participate with a performance work on this theme. The week is also an opportunity to develop our practices through intensive exchange and dialogue within this stunning natural environment. The whole week will form an open performative space in which new solo and collaborative actions can evolve, in addition to the solo performances we will prepare, leading to the presentation of these and a group performance on the final evening.

In activating the inherent political potency of the female body, we will break apart woman’s historically fraught, imposed ‘bond’ with nature to present radical performance that uses the female body as an activist body within this natural context.

Rosekill Farm will provide a safe and challenging environment where radical practitioners can share in a process of exploration, and present substantial works on our communal core subject of using the female body as both source and medium.


BACKGROUND:

We are interested in a rural space being a grounds of investigation and the distinction between ruralality and nature. Female bodies, while not any more or less a part of nature than a male body, are often essentialized as being more of-the-earth and "natural". We are interested investigating - as a group 'beehiving' it - ideas of what it means to be in a female body, occupy space and identity, and present work we make in relation to these ideas. 

 

Co-Organized by Poppy Jackson, Tif Robinette, Mairead Delaney & Jill McDermid