WEdances Movement Collaborative

WEdances
Movement
Collaborative

Inviting embodied relationships
with our internal and external wilderness

Performance projects and practices
with Mandy Herrick, Rufus Jupiter, AnnaJo Doerr

Photo: Peter Cozad

Damp Edges
October 13, 2024
WormFarm Institute's Farm/Art D'Tour
Witwen, WI

Backspace
January 2024 - ongoing
Viroqua, WI

Minnesota Marine Museum, Winona, MN
April 2024

Backspace is a movement practice inhabiting forgotten rural spaces and activating our relations with a single word. It asks the passersby to find potency in mundane landscapes, inclusion rather than erasure and tender perception in the body.

bodies of water
August 2023
Herbster, WI

bodies of water touches on the fluid relationship between the body and the surrounding waters of Wisconsin’s south shore. This site-responsive performance flows through ideas of transformation, presence and the importance of what it means to be water.

"I was awe struck when sitting on the beach on a Sunday morning watching bodies of water. The performance was a caliber I would expect to see in San Francisco or New York City. As with all great works of art, it implanted a feeling of joy that stayed with me a long time afterwards.” -Sara M, audience member

Controlled Flow/The Peony Project
June 2023
Fergus Falls, MN

Controlled Flow/The Peony Project explores how fluid moves through the body and our environment. The flow quality of Ottertail River is managed by a nearby dam upstream along with infrastructure to contain its movement. Performed with peony petals from the Driftless region of Wisconsin at the Rural Futures Summit, Fergus Falls, MN.
Commissioned by Springboard for the Arts

Photos: Rayshele Kamke

(m)omentum: wrapping the gutscape
January 2023
Magpie Gelato, Viroqua, WI

(m)omentum: wrapping the gutscape moves through ideas of what it means to ingest, transform, and manifest the world around us. How and where do we find potential spaces for expansion, release, and coming together? We invite you to consider how the workings of the gut are analogous with the workings of the environments and systems we navigate daily, and the role they play in our integration with the spaces we inhabit. If the gut holds more nerve cells than the spinal cord; what does that tell us about our "gut feelings"?

Featuring:
Matron of Squirrels with sound
franciszka voeltz with text
(text from audience participants)

(m)omentum: wrapping the gutscape was made possible through a grant from Springboard for the Arts
Peter Cozad Photography
Dylan Overhouse Productions (filming)

Here/Now/Feel
June 2021, VIVA Gallery, Viroqua, WI
Here/Now/Feel aims to explore presence and connection with the body, the public and activation of the surrounding space. It can be experienced like a work of visual art; viewing the micro/macro dynamics of the conceptual whole at any given moment in a 30 minute time frame.

Peter Cozad Photography

Drew Shonka Photography

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siteSee
August-October 2020

siteSee is a multi-location performance project investigating the synchronicity of the somatic body, outdoor space and audience choice of location. Performers explore themes of relationship, awakening and what it means to be a human animal in a site chosen by the viewer.

"As the dancers emerged from their oneness with the trees, the spaces between came alive with tension, rain pattering, earth thumping, synchronous and individual celebration!...To be able to be close, to be able to follow the dancers as they moved, was a gift. I left feeling my spirit lifted, like I was part of something magical. " --Vicky Ramsay, audience and photographer

siteSee locations: bike/pedestrian tunnel under State Hwy 14, prairie outside of Viroqua, WI, and Jersey Valley County Park, WI