Ingenious meets Indigenous at Creative Alliance in performances & exhibition
On Saturday and Sunday, May 16th and 17th, Creative Alliance will host to extraordinary live performances as part of an ongoing exhibition in their Rothschild Gallery, “When the Butterflies Would Visit,” conceived and curated by Tavia La Follette and running through June 13th.
The live components are Panama Jam, created and performed by JAM, and the eponymous When the Butterflies Would Visit, which was devised and created by–and will be performed by–a large contingent of Towson University students under the guidance of Professor La Follette. Both works as well as the exhibition as a whole emerge from extensive, immersive research, grounded in history, culture, science, and nature as much as out of original creative imagination–inviting audiences as active participants in an investigation, perhaps more than as witnesses to discovery.
Panama Jam came out of time spent in Panama by researcher and performer JAM in conversation and collaboration with members of the indigenous Guna community. It was shaped by observation and immersion; by questions about the collision between cultures and traditions, between technology and the natural world; and by documentary practice filtered through, and into, performance. And it’s also a jam.
When the Butterflies Would Come Visit takes its title–as the other piece and as the exhibition as a whole–from a line in a play by Analisa Dias, The Invention of Seeds. Using bits of text and ideas from that play as well as a host of other material, La Follette led a group of Towson University theater students through a devising process to create an entirely original performance that includes reflections on the same Guna community in Panama alongside larger questions surrounding climate, forms of knowledge, history and storytelling, and much more, all while drawing on a host of theatrical techniques.
Both performances and the event as a whole center on a set of questions–questions that lay at the heart of their creative processes and that live on in the experience of their performers and the audiences encountering them. Such questions as: how we keep knowledge alive, how knowledge itself can be a living thing, how we as technological societies can live in better harmony with life and the natural world, and well as others local and global that emerged out of the exploration. Shaped by a sense of play and a spirit of inquiry, both works aim to pose sometimes tough questions for audiences more than simply provide comforting answers.
For some basic answers, however, you can find more information about the performances online here and about the exhibition here.
My full conversation with Professor La Follette is here:
