Quick and Easy Guide to Experiencing SoMoS

Photo: Melissa Putz

• It's free 
• Wear comfortable clothing.  Leave the heals at home!  
• You may experience SoMoS from beginning to end or come in at anytime. Audiences get to choose how to experience SoMoS. Late arrivals are welcome! 
• There are two performance during the hours SoMoS is open—you can catch performances you've missed the second time around—also each iteration brings new creations so you will never see quite the same thing twice. 
•  Three large geodesic tents and an outdoor performance area with simultaneous performances for audiences to move in and out of at will. 
• You may sit, stand, walkabout or do all three.
• Docents will be there to help interested audience members negotiate the piece: these docents are dance and movement artists and scholars.
• The three geodesic tents have interior performance spaces devoted to winter, spring, and summer. Fall will be outdoors. 
• Once you arrive, you cannot miss it! 
  In inclement weather please check the blog (branchdances.blogspot.com) for updates

  

Some Highlights 

Photo: Lindsay Browning

• Performances are simultaneous. You can walk through the parking lot at your own leisure and take in what you choose from this feast of branch dancing.
• Outside and in the center of the event, dancer Olive Prince (of Olive Prince Dance) performs an hour-long solo with two massive 20-foot branches. Says Olive, "The weight of the branches becomes intense and it immediately requires me to sustain this constant awareness of my body and the branch moving in space."
•   In the spring tent dancers Marion Ramirez and Jung Woong Kim perform an intensely sensual duet amidst the sights and sounds of spring in extreme close up. Says Marion, "I imagine that we are seeds and we grow through the branches and get trapped and survive by going around another branch, and get rained on, and grow some more."
•  Jumatatu Poe (of idiosynCrazy productions) will perform with a large bundle of branches, stationed outside the summer tent, and standing on a floor cut in the shape of the map of Puerto Rico.
•  Massive video projections of nature up-close and the performers shadows will be projected inside and outside the tents.
• The summer tent will be a hang out for audience members. Merián explains, "The summer tent will have projections of a tropical beach and be empty except for a white gym floor and white exercise balls. It was an idea I had when I first built the large tent. It seemed so much fun I didn't want to mess with it."
• Multiple soundscapes of nature in quadraphonic sound. Says sound designer Cicada Brokaw Dennis, "The compositions are ever evolving and changing. Yet the pace is that of nature: a slow steady asynchronous interwoven complex of sound patterns which gradually shift and change."