Modern Dance, Aerial Dance, Choreography & Somatics

Performance, Teaching, Workshops

DIY PERFORMANCE SERIES 2022-2023

DANCE COMPLEX, 536 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA    

June 3, 2023 8pm EST Live / June 4, 2023 7pm EST Live & Livestream

Melissa Buckheit Dance’s ECO : ANIMAL : KIN is an interdisciplinary modern dance theatre project that uses recorded sound & poetry, interdisciplinary collaborative film, live dance, and dance film to create an immersive narrative and visual movement performance which follows four characters who move through time, connection and human experience. Inviting our live and livestream audience into our community-building art practice, ECO:ANIMAL:KIN seeks to ask questions and explore realities about our relationship as human animals with nature and the environment, other living creatures, history & oppression, capitalism, energy, place and time. Can we live together as kin in our material age? Can art-making practices and revisioning our human identity create new community and spaces for healing?  Can kinship link us back through place, time and energy? Who are we as human animals—and is there another way to be?

CAST
Melissa Buckheit Dance
featuring
Melissa Buckheit
Andy Taylor-Blenis
Karen Klein
Ken Kan

Choreography, conception, selected poetry & film by Melissa Buckheit

Interdisciplinary film/sound/poetry/dance/art collaborators: Wendy Burk, Sam Cha, Abigail Chabitnoy, Charles Coe, Ernest Dodge, Marvin Gladney, Karen Klein, Rachel Lehrman, Eric Magrane, Nanette Robinson, Circe Rowan, Steven Salmoni, Aidan Semmens, Carmen Lehrman Shahabaldine, Eleni Sikelianos, Micheal Stepansky & Maria Sara Villa.

Lighting design by Zachary Connell

Sound/video tech by Circe Rowan

GRATEFUL support for our project has been made from the following program & KICKSTARTER financial supporters: DANCE COMPLEX and its amazing staff, Ernest Dodge, Samantha Gross Zirkin, Karen Klein, Harry Buckheit, Jim Yagmin, Tom Haley, Michelle Osika Swank, Paul Helck, Mary Helen Laurence, Lauren Buckheit & Rob Gupta, Oliver Wilson, Rich & Diana Buckheit, Rachel Lehrman & Shahriar Roberto Shahabaldine, Michael Stepansky & Jane Kohuth, Julie Swarstad Johnson, Jennifer Liza Hongo, Lisa Cagnacci & you!

If our program spoke to you, please consider a pledge of support – our Kickstarter runs until Tuesday 6/6 and we are $371 away from our goal of $3300! Transformational art can happen without corporate funding!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/melissabuckheit/eco-animal-kin-an-interdisciplinary-dance-project

>>PLEASE SCROLL PAST OUR PROJECT STORY & PHOTO COLLAGE FOR CAST BIOS & PHOTOS

PROGRAM NOTES

ECO:ANIMAL:KIN was conceived in response to the state of our world: environment, human, animal, plant, ‘city’, ‘rural’, ‘nation’, interpersonal, social, psychic, historical, economic, spiritual and philosophical. To read more about my ideas for the project’s synthesis, I suggest scrolling down past our program to “THE STORY OF ECO:ANIMAL:KIN”. This offers a narrative about the project’s synthesis, photos, and greater depth about how our performance with a live and livestream audience is an art-making and community-building practice offering new ways of thinking, feeling and relationship. As stated above, the performance is interdisciplinary; it seeks to meld different ways of sensory processing, different art forms, as well as the diverse range of related subjects. The topics listed in our intro paragraph may seem vast, but if we think about them, they are connected historically, causally and proximally, as are we. As Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton and other environmental and cultural theorists speak about in their writings (and we quote Morton in our opening film), we are actually all part of one symbiosis (real), a solidarity that has been torn in the process of ‘human’ time through historical, economic and philosophic realities. With this idea about our co-relationship and the belief that art can make new spaces for connection, we invite you into our performance as fellow animals, rather than unique humans.

The live dance and dance film portions of our performance follow four characters who move through time, place and connection. Ken’s character lives in a Neolithic time and is able to move through permeable time to interact with Melissa’s character (who also moves through time)–who lives in the 18th c. They build connection, but exist when together separate from the other characters. Andy and Karen are mother and daughter (Andy gives birth to Karen in the first live duet); they also live in the 18th c. in no specific, actual place, but one impacted by historic realities like colonialism, and before industrialization. Movement vocabulary and theme connect with narrative to highlight the lives and experiences of the dancers’ characters. After the three female characters die in their own century due to violence, all arrive in the present in a questionable “A Modern Electric Age”. Time is permeable from this point, looking to the future, into the past and looping. The films and recorded poetry and music soundscape are more visual, directive and associative connections to larger ideas and emotions in the program. Together, we hope the performance brings our audience, performers and collaborators to see themselves in one another and the entire world that encircles us: an empathic, ethical, felt humming of the mind, body and spirit.

PROGRAM

1.  A CIRCLE   Short Film & Soundscape with selected text by Timothy Morton- film & text reading by Melissa Buckheit

2. THROUGH TIME   Dance Film – performed by Melissa Buckheit & Ken Kan  Music by Jeremy Soule

3. TWO WOMEN THE SAME: BIRTH & LIFE   Live Dance – performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis & Karen Klein Music by Abel Korzeniowski & Jeremy Soule

4. THE ANCESTRESS/HOW MANY KIN?   Live Dance & photo installation – performed by Melissa Buckheit  Images by Yale Medicine  Music by Yann Tiersen

5. THE GREEN LAND   Short Film & Soundscape – Performed poetry reading by Eric Magrane, Wendy Burk, Karen Klein, Aidan Semmens, Abigail Chabitnoy & Melissa Buckheit   Film by Melissa Buckheit

6. OUR LIVES   Live Dance – performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis & Melissa Buckheit  Music by A Korzeniowski

7. THE ANCESTORS, THE CHILDREN  Live Dance – choreography & performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis  Music by Yann Tiersen

8. THE LIVING KIN   Short Film & Soundscape — Performed poetry reading & music by Eleni Sikelianos, Josef Sikelianos, Kat White, Rachel Lehrman, Ernest Dodge, Aidan Semmens, Sam Cha, Abigail Chabitnoy & Marvin Gladney  Film by M. Buckheit

9. WHO ARE WE/WHERE DO WE SURVIVE? Live Dance – performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis, Melissa Buckheit & Karen Klein  Music by Abel Korzeniowski

10. THE EMPTY NOTHING  Live Dance – performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis, Melissa Buckheit & Karen Klein   Music by Zbigniew Preisner

11. OUR FLOATING WATER & AIR Short Film & Soundscape — Performed poetry reading & music by Steven Salmoni, Charles Coe, Abigail Chabitnoy &  Sam Cha   Film by Melissa Buckheit

12. AN ELECTRIC MODERN AGE   Live Dance – performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis, Melissa Buckheit & Karen Klein  Music by Rachels

13. THE END OF THE EARTH   Dance Film – choreography by Melissa Buckheit & Ken Kan – performed by Ken Kan  Music by Zbigniew Preisner

14. HUMAN ANIMALS  Collaborative Film – Photography by Michael Stepansky  Dance by Maria Sara Villa, Nanette Robinson, Circe Rowan, Karen Klein  Film by Carmen Lehrman Shahabaldine, Rachel Lehrman, Ernest Dodge & Melissa Buckheit Music by A. Korzeniowski

15. THE LOVER IN THE ETHER   Live Dance – choreography & performed by Karen Klein  Music by Zbigniew Preisner

14. THE HUMAN WILD   Dance Film  – performed by Melissa Buckheit & Ken Kan  Music by Jeremy Soule, Abel Korzeniowski  Poetry & reading by Melissa Buckheit

15. A CONVERGENCE IN TIME   Live Dance + Dance Film – performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis, Melissa Buckheit, Ken Kan & Karen Klein  Music by Abel Korzeniowski

16. HUMAN SUFFERING/A RETURN   Live Dance  – performed by Andy Taylor-Blenis, Melissa Buckheit, Ken Kan & Karen Klein  Music by Jeremy Soule Poetry & reading by Melissa Buckheit

>>PLEASE SCROLL PAST OUR PROJECT STORY & PHOTO COLLAGE FOR CAST BIOS & PHOTOS

The Story of ECO:ANIMAL:KIN

ECO:ANIMAL:KIN & OUR WORLD

Hello! My name is Melissa Buckheit. I’m a dancer, choreographer, poet, arts educator and activist who’s been dancing, choreographing and publishing poetry professionally since 2001. I’m using Kickstarter to raise funds through community arts engagement and grassroots organizing, rather than corporate support, so our integral and timely project can be a success. Our performances are June 3 & 4, 2023 in Boston, MA (with a livestream Eventbrite tickets accessible with internet access for our June 4 performance) at the community dance non-profit, the Dance Complex, a home to so many folks who want to move in their bodies: dancers, people in all walks of life, professionals, amateurs and more. I’ve been dancing there since 1998, when I was in college.  I studied at Brandeis University (B.A., English/CW, Theatre/Dance, French) and Naropa University (M.F.A, Creative Writing, Poetry, Somatics). 

I started dreaming up this interdisciplinary dance project over three years ago–right before the pandemic hit, in January 2020. As a choreographer and dancer (Melissa Buckheit Dance), my creative performance work is very hybrid and has incorporated video projection, photography, dance film, soundscapes and recorded poetry in live dance performance over the last 20+ years. I work primarily in modern dance theatre, as well as aerial trapeze, Somatics, dance improvisation and contact improv with influences from Body-Mind Centering. I’m also an Integrative bodyworker & Orthopedic Massage Therapist. 

I began brainstorming about ECO:ANIMAL:KIN because I was thinking about the numerous problems in the world that seemed so painful and insurmountable. I felt so digitally hyperconnected and overstimulated, while also feeling bodily disconnected and exhausted in daily life. I was (and had been) working crazy hours at multiple jobs for years (like many folks, including artists). Sometimes, I barely had time to talk to my friends and family, let alone be outside in nature or sense my body. Around me, incredible suffering and injustice surged. I knew I wasn’t alone, and this way of existing wasn’t new. But, I wondered, why must we live this way? Why do we? The energy in and reality of the world was (and is still) so fraught: ugly, aggressive & oftentimes violent; competitive, lacking access & equity; hyper-materialistic, chaotic; and lacking respect, dignity and basic compassion. Yet, the kind, open-hearted diversity of people whom I considered friends, family, co-workers, and fellow artists around the United States and beyond were like me: good, mindful, human beings. If everyone was feeling as I was, from whence was the pain, animosity, disassociation and loss coming? Since 2020, these feelings have only increased, compounded with a global PTSD from the COVID pandemic as well as surges in hate and violence against POC, women and folks of different religions, in particular. 

As an activist, an artist and an educator, I felt and know that the threads from this energy link back into colonial history and oppression, our exploitive relationship with the environment, nature and our fellow living animals & plants, as well as the suffering uniformity of our modern, capitalist age which has forgotten our whole living kinship and human community. Saying these things aloud probably sounds like some esoteric idea or an idealized concept of how life might have been better in the past. Let me say clearly that this is not my meaning or reality. The truth in 2023 is that we don’t have the mental time and have forgotten the memory of a different way of living, being and connecting together.  We are so used to the ethos and confines of the world we have created that another one seems unimaginable. But, what if it isn’t?

In conceiving of ECO:ANIMAL:KIN project, I wanted to use immersive modern dance theatre, poetry and interdisciplinary art to explore and question these ideas and relationships—and to examine how we can move back toward human-animal kinship & balance with our environment–rather than exploitation. I wanted to acknowledge the effects of colonial and patriarchal history and seek equity and healing, question an economic ethos that results in widespread hunger & suffering, and examine the permeability of time, space, spirit and what’s beyond the visible.  

ECO:ANIMAL:KIN follows the stories of four characters who move through and exist at different historical times & places:  living, being born, dying, loving and emerging through moments of history, perception & human/natural connection. We are an interdisciplinary modern dance theatre performance that merges immersive live dance with video art, recorded sound & text-scape, poetry, interdisciplinary collaborative film, and dance film–to create new human community & healing through art-practices, narrative storytelling, somatic embodiment and remembering our ancestral-animal selves. This interdisciplinary dance theatre project will not only explore these ideas, make us feel and prompt us to think, but our performance will also be an enactment of this ‘new human-animal-earth community and healing through art’–for our dancers, our audience, our crowdfunding backers and our collaborative artists–whether live in person or live-streaming at home. This is why we invite you to attend ECO:ANIMAL:KIN, and possibly make a small (or large) pledge of support through Kickstarter. Let’s be kin. 🌱

DONATE TO OUR KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/melissabuckheit/eco-animal-kin-an-interdisciplinary-dance-project

WHO WE ARE AND ABOUT US: THE PROJECT 

We are four live modern dancers and a collaborative group of diverse artists working in different media from around the United States and abroad.  Learn about us below! Contact us through social media! We’d love to get to know you. 

Melissa Buckheit Dance
featuring
Melissa Buckheit
Andy Taylor-Blenis
Karen Klein
Ken Kan

Interdisciplinary film/sound/poetry/dance collaborations with Wendy Burk, Sam Cha, Charles Coe, Ernest Dodge, Marvin Gladney, Karen Klein, Rachel Lehrman, Eric Magrane, Nanette Robinson, Circe Rowan, Steven Salmoni, Aidan Semmens, Carmen Lehrman Shahabaldine, Eleni Sikelianos, Micheal Stepansky, Maria Sara Villa & more.

Lighting design by Zachary Connell

Sound/video tech by Circe Rowan

ABOUT OUR SPACE, THE DANCE COMPLEX & FUNDING GOALS

The Dance Complex has an amazing DIY Performance Series, one of a handful of awesome community series that have been funded through state, local and other sources. I was really lucky that they picked our project, ECO:ANIMAL:KIN for their 2022-2023 Program. Being part of the DIY Series means that the Dance Complex finances the majority of the expenses of our weekend of performances in June. Certain things in our budget are not paid for: rehearsal space rental since January 2023, the cost of paying our lighting designer, Zack Connell, a wonderful Lighting Design student at Boston University, paying our sound/video tech professional, Circe Rowan, paying the Dance Complex for the unsupported portion of the DIY Series grant, and most importantly, paying our dancers for the hours of rehearsal and performance! I am an independent choreographer and ours is an ambitious but community-created project. Our dancers, Andy, Karen and Ken, like many artists (myself included), won’t expect to become wealthy from dancing. But, it is very important that working artists be paid.  

I’ve paid the cost of studio rental from a small artist’s savings for nearly five months, more than $1400 dollars, while driving from CT to MA every week to rehearse our project. This is a sum that I don’t expect to recoup. But, for our project to make that final hurdle, we need fellow artists, non-artists, small business owners, community-minded folks, arts supporters, friends and family to give just a little bit (or a generous amount) through our Kickstarter in the next month. We know we can do it! Everyone will get a THANK YOU in our print/online program, and we have some wonderful larger rewards, too. Even our “profit” from ticket sales (possibly $600-$700) is accounted for (for dancer & art collaborator pay) in our budget (and is by no means a solid thing, since we chose tiered tickets for accessibility). 

We have left our campaign closing date for three business days after our show, to allow attendees to support us after performance. All backers who pledge at a level with a ticket reward, will receive their ticket for show nights, even though our kickstarter will be open until June 10. Please make sure to include your email and contact info, as all tickets (virtual or live in Boston), will be processed & delivered in the week leading up to our show (and completed the am of June 3 or June 4, for later backers!) We’re confident we can meet our goal, but we need YOU, our community. 

 Here is the honest breakdown of our funding goal (plus Kickstarter costs and taxes)

$1,190.00  Dance Complex contract payout (insurance, staff, video feed/recording, publicity & marketing, theatre space rental)

$450  Student Lighting Designer fee for design, rehearsal & performance hours

$450  Sound/video tech professional fee for rehearsal & performance hours

$550  Remaining dancer pay for months of rehearsal & performance hours 

$200 Remaining art collaborator pay 

$160 Kickstarter 5% Fee

$160 Kickstarter 3-5% Funding Transaction Fee

$140 Taxes payout for Kickstarter total 

= $3,300   Kickstarter Funding Goal

THANK YOU FOR YOUR GRASSROOTS SUPPORT!  OUR CAMPAIGN ENDS 6/10 at 11:59PM EST! EACH PLEDGE OF SUPPORT WILL TAKE US TO OUR GOAL TO PAY OUR ARTISTS, TECH FOLKS, DESIGNERS & THE DANCE COMPLEX.  IF EVERYONE HELPS WITH A SMALL (OR LARGER) GIFT, THIS WILL BE OUR PROJECT!  –THE CAST & CREW

CAST & CREW

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

About Melissa Buckheit Dance
Melissa Buckheit (Melissa Buckheit Dance) is a dancer & choreographer, poet, translator, interdisciplinary artist, educator and Orthopedic Massage Therapist. She’s danced and choreographed around the country (most notably Boston, Santa Fe, Boulder, Tucson) since 1997, creating interdisciplinary modern dance theatre and aerial dance, individually and collaboratively. Her work hybridizes human movement and dance with somatics, video installation, text/poetry live performance & soundscapes, science, the humanities and social/human activism. She’s collaborated and danced with Susan Dibble/Dibble Dance, Zuzi! Dance Company, Maria Sara Villa, Mechelle Fleming, Nathan Dryden, Nanette Robinson, Karyn Reim, Andy Taylor-Blenis, Brandeis Dance Collective and more. She’s taught Aerial Dance, Somatics, modern dance, Creative Writing, Literature and choreography through dance residencies, dance companies, middle schools, non-profits, colleges and independently. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing, Literature and Dance/Theatre from Brandeis University, an M.F.A. in Poetry from Naropa University, and is the author of three books, Noctilucent (Shearsman, 2012); Arc (Drunken Boat, 2008) and Dulcet You (dancing girl, 2016). Find her at melissabuckheit.com

About Andy Taylor-Blenis
Andy Taylor-Blenis has been dancing since she was very young.  She loves performing dances from around the world through International Folk Dance (IFD), as well as creating choreographies through Modern and Jazz.  She started dancing with her parents, Marianne and Conny Taylor, co-founders of the Folk Arts Center of New England, in IFD as well as creative dance with her mother. She holds a BFA in Dance and a minor in Social Anthropology from UMass Amherst. She has danced professionally in the Cambridge area since 1983.  She is artistic director to an adult group of Scottish Country Dancers, works with Back Pocket Dancers to tell stories through narration, movement and music, and is certified in Scottish Country Dance.  She works with children from K through college and runs classes for ages 55 +. Andy is also the artistic director of Mladost Folk Ensemble, a youth folk dance troupe which she founded upon the death of her father in 2006 and continues in the spirit of her parents’ work. She believes that dancing is breathing.

About Karen Klein
Karen Klein’s creative thread runs through many forms: poetry, dance, visual art. After retiring from Brandeis faculty in the English Department, she returned to modern dance, performing for 15 years with Prometheus Elders and 8 years with Across the Ages Dance. In 2011-12, she performed in Prometheus Dance production of Desiderare; her poetry provided the verbal structure. She has published poems nationally and internationally in both haiku and modern lyric forms in print and on-line journals, in anthologies and newspapers. In 2016, she founded teXtmoVes, a poetry/dance collaborative with past performances in art galleries, public libraries, Hibernian Hall, The Dance Complex, the DeCordova Museum and Starlight Stage.  A member of Steeple Street Poets and BagelBards, she currently collaborates with choreographer Sean Murphy in dance theater productions. In 2022, she published THIS CLOSE, her first full-length collection of poems, with Ibbetson Street Press in Somerville, MA.

About Ken Kan
With a passion for rhythm and grace, Ken Kan has explored the vibrant worlds of ballroom, swing, house, and modern dance for the past seven years. A versatile and dedicated performer, he weaves together diverse styles to remind us of the beauty found in the simple joy of dance. He attended Babson College and is currently a software engineering manager.

About Zachary Connell

Zachary Connell (he/him) is a third-year at Boston University School of Theatre studying Lighting Design. Originally from the Chicago land area, Zack first found his love for lighting design for dance back in high school working on the dance shows with his sister. He is very thankful to his fellow artistic collaborators on this project for the beautiful work they have created together. Please check out his website at zacharyconnell.com

About Wendy Burk 

Wendy Burk is a poet and translator. She is the author of Tree Talks: Southern Arizona (Delete Press) and the translator of Tedi López Mills’s Against the Current (Phoneme Media). Wendy is the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Projects Fellowship and a 2015 Artist Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. 

About Sam Cha

Sam Cha was born in Korea, and earned an MFA at UMass Boston. A poet, essayist, teacher, and translator, he’s been widely published and anthologized: he holds the dubious distinction of being (to date) the only poet listed in the Pushcart Prize index credited with a title that begins with “Motherfuckers.” His 2018 chapbook, American Carnage, is available from Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. The Yellow Book, his 2020 full-length collection of cross-genre work, is available from [PANK]. He lives with his family in Cambridge, MA.

About Charles Coe

Charles Coe is the author of four books of poetry: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents, Picnic on the Moon, Memento Mori, and the recently released Purgatory Road, all published by Leapfrog Press. He is also author of Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media. Charles was a 2017 artist-in-residence for the city of Boston, where he created an oral history project focused on residents of Mission Hill. He is an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts writing program.

About Ernest Dodge

Ernest Dodge is a fiction writer, a poet, a translator and a high school and college teacher of English, Latin and Greek for over thirty years. He is very connected to the living plants, trees, people and places in the town where his family has lived for generations in Connecticut. He is an amateur photographer, a woodworker and a gardener in all seasons. 

About Marvin Gladney

Marvin Gladney is a Tucson-based educator, writer, and sound artist. A native of Chicago, his music production work has been featured on G-Strings (with Mr. Greenweedz), No Additives, No Preservatives, and Second Nature by All Natural (capital D and Tone B. Nimble), as well as in the scores of video work by his wife, Sama Alshaibi, and in the documentary work of his brother-in-law, Usama Alshaibi (American Arab). His writings have appeared in African-American Review, the South African journal, Social Dynamics, Warpland, and Double Room. A graduate of Chicago State University and the University of Denver, Gladney lives in Arizona with his wife, Sama and their two sons.

About Rachel Lehrman 

Rachel Lehrman is a poet, writer, educator and mother currently living in Gainesville, FL. Rachel Lehrman moved to London in 2002 after completing her MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona.  She published her first chapbook, Second Waking, with Oystercatcher in 2010.  Her poetry has also appeared in Blue Fifth Review, The Drunken Boat, Molly Bloom, Fire Magazine, Shearsman Magazine and the anthologies Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets(Shearsman 2010), Sea Pie: A Shearsman Anthology of Oystercatcher Poetry (2012) and The Sonoran Desert:  A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press  2016). In 2009 she completed a practice-based PhD on collaborative authorship in the arts. She is also a passionate fan of children’s literature and a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. 

About Eric Magrane

Eric Magrane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at New Mexico State University (NMSU). His work takes multiple forms, from scholarly to literary to artistic. He is the coeditor of The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press), a hybrid field guide and literary anthology that has received several awards, including a 2016 Southwest Book of the Year and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. In his research and creative work, he is particularly interested in environmental narratives, sense of place, and contemporary artistic and literary responses to environmental change. He has been an artist in residence in three U.S. national parks and served as poet in residence at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a bioregional zoo, botanical garden, and natural history museum. His article “Situating Geopoetics” appeared in the first issue of the American Association of Geographers’s  GeoHumanities journal and has established his work on the leading edge of the field. His edited book Geopoetics in Practice (2020) is published in Routledge’s Research in Culture, Space, and Identity Series. Recent work also appears in Bioscience, Dialogues in Human Geography, Cultural Geographies, Literary Geographies, Antipode, Ecotone, ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies, Creativity (Key Ideas in Geography series, Routledge), Journal of the Southwest, and in the literary collections Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan) and Big Energy: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change (BlazeVox) and elsewhere.  www.ericmagrane.com.

About Nanette Robinson

Nanette Robinson, choreographer, somatic educator and dancer is ZUZI! Dance Co-Founder and Artistic Director, holds a BFA in Dance from Temple University.  She is an introductory and ongoing certified instructor of Skinner Releasing Technique and a certified yoga instructor.  Nanette has been strongly influenced by the somatic practice of Releasing and Alexander technique over the years.  She has been teaching and training instructors in aerial dance technique for over 20 years.  Nanette is currently teaching at ZUZI! Paolo Freire School, Mirasol Recovery Treatment Program and ZUZI! School.  

About Circe Rowan

Circe Rowan is a Boston-based performing artist and engineer, working in such diverse disciplines as film, theater, dance and circus arts. She specializes in media tech (historical and current) and its applications, both in production and live performance. Up in the booth, she has provided technical support for artists such as Boston Dance Theater/Khambatta Dance Company, Jean Appolon Expressions, and The Click (as part of the DC Bloom Residency), Maggie Cee (Dancing Queerly), Alive Dance Collective, and DANCE NOW Boston. Down in the workshop, she spends her time crafting costumes for herself and other, and devising new and thrilling ways to make things light up on command. Currently, she is hard at work developing a one-woman autobiographical stage show, incorporating props, projection, and patter into a running monologue about dance, development and disability–and how to keep fancy rats in proper styles.

About Steven Salmoni

Steven Salmoni will be reading in EDGE 97: Sam Cha, Charles Coe & Steven Salmoni at Trident Booksellers & Cafe in Boston on May 17 at 7pm.   Steven Salmoni’s recent publications include A Day of Glass, the chapbook Landscape, With Green Mangoes (both from Chax Press) and poems in Puerto del Sol, P-Queue, Mid-American Review, The Brooklyn Review and Interim. Selections of his work have also been included in the anthologies The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (U of Arizona Press, 2016), The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Editions, 2022) and The Last Milkweed (Tupelo Press, forthcoming 2023). The majority of his critical/scholarly work has focused on Henry James,  and he has published articles on these subjects in Studies in Travel Writing, The Journal of Narrative Theory and The Critical Companion to Henry James.  In 2012, he contributed the article “Spectres Of Benjamin”: (Re)Presentation And (Re)Semblance In Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime” to the Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein. Steven received a M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Stony Brook University and is currently the Department Head of English at Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ. He also serves on the Board of Directors for POG, a Tucson-based literary and arts organization that hosts an annual reading series.

About Aidan Semmens

Aidan Semmens is the author of six volumes of poetry – A Stone Dog (Shearsman Books 2011), The Book of Isaac (Free Verse / Parlor Press 2013), Uncertain Measures (Shearsman 2014), Life Has Become More Cheerful (Shearsman 2017) and There Will Be Singing (Shearsman 2020). The Jazz Age, a sequence of surreal and comic vignettes casting historical characters into anachronistic situations, was chosen by Salt Publishing to relaunch its Modern Poets series in 2022. He is also editor of the online poetry magazine Molly Bloom, and before moving to Orkney edited an anthology of Suffolk poetry, By the North Sea (Shearsman 2013). He is widely published in poetry magazines and has given many readings of his work, including at festivals in Berlin, Aldeburgh and Dorset. Professionally, he has been a sportswriter, a news columnist, and a sub-editor for newspapers including The Daily Mirror, The Independent, the i, and for many years the News of the World, where he specialised in sport. He has also written for magazines on subjects ranging from medieval church art and architecture to photography, travel and green issues. He has been wielding a lens since 1965; his photos have appeared in various newspapers, magazines and academic books.

About Carmen Lehrman Shahabaldine

Carmen Lehrman Shahabaldine is 10 years old. She lives with her mother, father, two cats and her dog in Gainesville, Florida. Carmen loves all animals and she is passionate about animal rights. Her hobbies include photography and video-making.

About Eleni Sikelianos

Born in California on Walt Whitman’s birthday, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and “a master of mixing genres.” She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023) is her tenth book of poetry, riding alongside two memoir-verse-image-novels. Sikelianos’s writing, frequently saturated with delight in the natural world and a layperson’s study of biology, is dedicated to turning the kaleidoscope for more angles on what being alive looks and feels like. Edge-play manifests in her collaborative work with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, including Mel Chin, Ed Bowes, Courtney Stephens, and Philip Glass. She has translated three books from the French, by Jacques Roubaud, Sabine Macher, and Mohamed Leftah, and her own work has been translated into over a dozen languages, with seven books in French and two in Greek.

Her honors include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Gertrude Stein Awards, a Fulbright, a Seeger Fellowship at Princeton, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the James D. Phelan award, and residencies at Ucross, Bogliasco, Yaddo, and Djerassi. Her work has been anthologized in many places: The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry, Norton’s American Hybrid, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, A Best of Fence, Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Women Poets in North American and the UK, etc; and has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and more.  Dedicated to the many ways poetry manifests in communities, Sikelianos has taught workshops in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons. She now teaches Literary Arts at Brown University and is frequently on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program. The great granddaughter of Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and theater director Eva Palmer Sikelianos, she shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.

About Michael Stepansky

Michael Stepansky is a photographer and the Director of Employment for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. He became serious about photography when he became serious about wanting to understand people, or possibly the other way around. Over his life, he has had many interests, but photography has been one of the only constants. Michael grew up in New Jersey, went to Brandeis and George Washington Universities, and now lives in Holliston, MA with his wife, the children’s book author Jane Kohuth, his son Kameron, and two cats. Michael completed his second darkroom during quarantine in August 2020.

About Maria Sara Villa

Maria has danced all her life–at times“professionally”, sometimes not–but always for the sheer joy of it. Born and raised in Colombia, she has lived in Tucson for the last twenty years. She has been a birth doula and is now a registered nurse helping families and newborns. She is also a writer. She has two grown children who used to keep her very busy.