ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
Anima Mundi is an interdisciplinary work that challenges the amnesia that contemporary human beings have in their connection to the rest of the natural world and to each other. It explores our longing for oneness, our unconscious animistic tendencies to create extensions of ourselves through technology, and our urgent need for the awakening of compassion for the beings – human or otherwise – that surround us. The work will incorporate performance, installation, video projection and live music to create an immersive world that challenges the viewer to reflect on their own relationship to the rest of nature and attempts to take an approach that honors the non-human perspective. The work is driven by the yearning we feel to reconnect with a sense of place, the materials and inanimate objects around us, and with our ancestral spirits. This BAC residency will focus on the choreographic and musical elements of the work. Degenerate Art Ensemble makes work inspired by punk, comics, cinema, protest, nightmares, and fairy tales, driven by the power of live music and their own style of visceral movement theater and dance. The group is known for their large scale dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Joshua Kohl is the composer, creative producer and co-founder of the Seattle based multi-art group Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). His music spans electronic, orchestral, invented instrumentations and rock ensembles and has been featured in DAE’s work since its inception. He is the recipient of awards from Creative Capital, Music Theatre Now, MAP Fund, New Music USA, and NPN among others. In 2016 he conducted his orchestral reimaginings of the legendary Czech band Uz Jsme Doma’s songs in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. His recent collaboration with dancer Haruko Crow Nishimura, sculptor Senga Nengudi, and New York based violinist Eddy Kwon was commissioned by Colorado College, the Find Art Center of Colorado Springs, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and the National Performance Network. In 2022, his work with DAE Skeleton Flower was performed in Denmark at the HC Andersen Festival and Seattle’s On The Boards in Seattle.
Haruko Crow Nishimura is a dancer, vocalist and co-director of the interdisciplinary group Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). She is always searching to discover how art can create deeper connections and awakenings. Her unique style of movement is inspired by her practices of physical theater and butoh dance. She excavates the dark corners of humanity, inventing new mythologies and reimagining fairy tales, telling stories that strive to reveal hidden beauty, confront demons, and ultimately find healing. She is the recipient of a Dale Chihuly / Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was commissioned with her group DAE by director Robert Wilson to re-interpret his work Einstein on the Beach, created a solo dance with Kronos Quartet at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for legendary dancer Anna Halprin’s 95 Rituals in San Francisco, and created a large scale site specific collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects in Seattle. She has performed her dance work throughout North America and Europe. Her newest work Skeleton Flower premiered at the SPOTLIGHT USA dance festival in Bulgaria presented by American Dance Abroad, at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City, and the Hans Christian Andersen Festival in Odense, Denmark.
BAC OPEN STORY
By Shin Yu Pai
I wrote the poem “Vernix” in response to Degenerate Art Ensemble’s (DAE) work-in-progress Anima Mundi, which they developed in part while in residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center. I’d observed the idea of reincarnation and intergenerational memory as a concern in DAE’s earlier work, including most recently their performance Skeleton Flower. With Anima Mundi, I felt the centering of somatic memories around the birth experience coming forward in this performance.
As a writer who is also a mother to a young child, I connect to the somatic traces and embodied experience of both being born and giving birth. Watching Crow Nishimura’s character move and evolve through phases of consciousness opened in me the unfolding experience of human development. That process is one of coming into wakefulness, as well as awakening to the isolation and longing that comes through the awareness of the human condition.
Yet this work also speaks deeply to me of species loneliness. As humans, we can think or believe that we are separate of, or even superior to this world, when in reality, we are the same as animals when we locate and remember the place of wildness within ourselves.
VERNIX
when we are (re) born
there is profound loss,
of womb & wound
of forgetting, the journey
through birth canal
from warmth & darkness
into the harsh light
of where you first exist
outside the shape of mother
the body coated in a film
of afterbirth that seals
the skin shut with its protection
weighted with this covering
my body feels its own gravity
in straining to open
the eyes, unclench a clawed
fist, feeling the bones relax
into place after being
squeezed for nine months
by amniotic fluid
consciousness emerging
slowly, we learn first
to see, roll over, then pull
ourselves up to standing
the same as any other animal
except we sense the outline
cast, how the I & shadow
are inseparable and in meeting
her, the voice locating
the primal yowl of one
born to run with wolves
Shin Yu Pai is currently Civic Poet of the City of Seattle. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Virga, ENSŌ, Sightings, Aux Arcs, Adamantine, and Equivalence. She served as the fourth poet laureate of the city of Redmond from 2015 to 2017 and has been an artist in residence for the Seattle Art Museum and Pacific Science Center. She is a three-time fellow of MacDowell and has been in residence at Taipei Artist Village, The Ragdale Foundation, and The National Park Service. Her personal essays have appeared in Tricycle, Atlas Obscura, CityArts, and YES! Magazine.