Engaging Community through Art

The LRWP works closely with area artists to engage our community in science and stewardship. New Brunswick-based coLAB Arts is a stalwart collaborator, and our groups have co-developed the watershed sculpture project and Rail-Arts-River.

In addition to working with coLAB, in early 2016 the LRWP initiated conversations with Monteleone Dance around communicating the wide variety ecological issues facing the river and its inhabitants through dance. Monteleone Dance joined the LRWP in conversation, at meetings, and at stream clean-ups, eventually developing “Squaring the Circle” as a tool to convey many of the issues we face in our urban watershed restoration work.

“Squaring the Circle” is described by the choreographer as “creating a movement ecosystem illustrating Zen Buddhist philosophies. A “natural” installation is transmuted into a conventional designation of space, revealing metaphors of ancient Greek geometry. This is both a group protocol and a ritual that collides the seemingly natural with the possibly manufactured, through transmuting installation, inviting a grossly curious dissonance to the unsuspecting viewer. From grass to metal to skin to bone, this work mines away the interfaces between mind, body, and material, ultimately probing the rigid mental encapsulation that “identity” can institute.”

ABOUT MONTELEONE DANCE

Monteleone Dance is a research based dance company that presents highly conceptual multimedia dance works. The company has already received high acclaim for its innovative and idiosyncratic movement language. Through this distinctly researched vocabulary, alongside multimedia collaboration, the artists investigate the beclouded realm between man and machine, organism and sterility, and the cognition of interface. The work confronts the human experience, analyzing and probing the human psyche in the context of today’s technological zeitgeist and cultural fabric.