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Jersey Arts Podcast
The Jersey Arts Podcast presents in-depth, one-on-one conversations with the liveliest and most intriguing personalities in New Jersey’s arts scene. From the casts of hit shows to critically acclaimed film producers; from world-renowned poets to classically trained musicians; from groundbreaking dance visionaries to cutting-edge fine artists, our podcast connects you to what’s happening in your local arts community.
Jersey Arts Podcast
Dancing through the Air: 'Noli Timere' Marks World Premiere at McCarter Theater
“Noli Timere” is Latin for “be not afraid,” and the name of the world premiere presentation from Director and Choreographer, Rebecca Lazier and Sculptor, Janet Echelman. The collaboration features eight multidisciplinary performers dancing up to 25 feet in the air within a voluminous, custom-designed Echelman net sculpture.
Choreographed to an original score by JORANE, this fusion of contemporary dance, avant-garde circus, and sculpture explores the delicate interconnectedness and fragility of our world, offering a profound commentary on navigating our unstable ecosystem through art and advanced engineering.
One peak at Echelman’s net sculptures and you can immediately understand the breadth of talent on display. Known to sculpt at the scale of buildings and city blocks, this will be the first time that Echelman has designed a figure to allow for humans in her net.
Those humans are led by Princeton University Professor and choreographer, Rebecca Lazier who has choreographed more than 80 works presented in six countries. She is recognized as an audacious experimenter creating dances of explosive physical vitality inspired by the thinking and problem-solving that is possible through collaboration.
Take a listen to learn more about this impressive new spectacle, premiering worldwide at Mccarter Theater this February.
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This is Gina Marie Rodriguez and you're listening to the Jersey Arts Podcast Noli Timere. Latin for Be Not Afraid and the name of the world premiere presentation from director and choreographer Rebecca Lazier and sculptor Janet Echelman. The collaboration features eight multidisciplinary performers dancing up to 25 feet in the air with a voluminous, custom-designed Echelman net sculpture Choreographed to an original score by JORANE. This fusion of contemporary dance, avant-garde circus and sculpture explores the delicate interconnectedness and fragility of our world, offering a profound commentary on navigating our unstable ecosystem through art and advanced engineering. One peek at Echelman's net sculptures and you can immediately understand the breadth of talent on display. Known to sculpt at the scale of buildings and city blocks, this will be the first time that Echelman has designed a figure to allow for humans in her net. Those humans are led by Princeton University professor and choreographer, Rebecca Lazier, who has choreographed more than 80 works presented in six net. Those humans are led by Princeton University professor and choreographer, Rebecca Lazier, who has choreographed more than 80 works presented in six countries. She is recognized as an audacious experimenter, creating dances of explosive physical vitality inspired by the thinking and problem-solving that is possible through collaboration, and that seems to be the theme of today's conversation Rebecca, Janet and I discuss the joys and challenges that come from collaboration.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:Take a listen to learn more about this impressive new spectacle Noli to Marry. I'd just like to thank you both so much for being with me today. I'm super excited to talk to you about this because it is probably one of the more unique performances or productions that I've covered. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. How are you both?
Rebecca Lazier:Terrific, so excited to be here. We're in the middle of rehearsals and it's been a six-year process of collaboration with my dear Janet and it's a thrill to be coming to the place to share it with the public.
Janet Echelman:And I would just mention that Rebecca and I have been collaborating for the last five years, so you can only imagine how anticipated this premiere is for all of us.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:I can only imagine when you say it's been a five-year collaboration. Did you know each other prior to this or did you meet because of this collaboration? You want to take it, Rebecca yes, yes, thanks, janet.
Rebecca Lazier:Um, we met. We met in 2018 at a conference for the intersection of arts and engineering hosted at Princeton University and Janet was the keynote speaker and I fangirled to her because I thought her work was so extraordinary story and actually one of my pieces that had been collaboration with Professor Naomi Leonard there might be others was also part of the opening offerings and Janet came up to me to talk to me and that was a bit of kismet to sort of what could we do together? What would it be to have humans in the nets?
Janet Echelman:So I fangirled Rebecca as well.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:I love it so much. I'm going to fangirl you both now, because I was looking at I don't know what we want to call it a trailer or a teaser video of this piece, and I mean, as someone who is both afraid of heights and unable to get into and out of a hammock, this is really stunning to me. I find this piece just awe-inspiring. Well, I'm sure that we could talk for hours about the societal implications that could be inferred from this piece. We are short on time, so instead, rebecca, I'd like to ask how do you go about choreographing something that will inherently be different each time it's performed, and what does that experience mean to you?
Rebecca Lazier:Great question. Thank you, Gina. The essence of this piece is imagine yourself standing on a net where every shift of your weight has a ripple through the whole system. Right, Even if you're the smallest. You just move one little key element, the whole thing changes. And so if someone else is there the moment I shift something, something in them changes, but if they fall I could be tossed out.
Rebecca Lazier:So that sense of how our impact, it's an emotional impact, it's a felt impact and it's made visible, it's real. And so a lot of the choreography is very much about what can we predict and what can we not predict. So we can predict connection, we can predict how we relate to each other, we can set where we're going to be approximately on a point in space and then from there we have a language of systems of movement, we have a language of seeing, we have a language of responsiveness and cueing and tuning to each other. But yes, there is this unpredictability too, where if someone just slides a little bit further, it's going to change how someone else gets into the net. But there's a physical intelligence that the dancers have been gaining with each rehearsal session and, for example, you know we just returned to begin a three-week rehearsal session and the learning curve is so fast because they have so much in their bodies about what it is to learn to be one with this new apparatus, this new way of being in space and in time, and with each other.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:It was so fascinating to me and Janet, you had mentioned that it was your idea correct to introduce humans into the space, so to speak.
Janet Echelman:Well, I have long imagined humans dancing in my nets or moving in and around and on top of my nets, but until more recently, this has really just been an incredible, eye-opening experience getting to collaborate with Rebecca and the way that she choreographs her dancers in the net.
Janet Echelman:My only prior dance experience was a usage where the nets were coming from above touching the heads of dancers, and this is the first time that dancers are actually inside the nets, exploring this sense of precarity which is where the title comes from Like that, when even the ground beneath our feet is no longer stable, the the ground beneath our feet is no longer stable, then I think this is is an experience that I certainly myself have been been experienced, really uh, heightened since the pandemic, uh, and I think all of us in in some way, are feeling a sense of the things that we, the assumptions on which we based our planning, our thinking around, have changed, have shifted and are constantly shifting, and so the way that Rebecca is choreographing with human movement and weight, even having a dancer just stand still in the net, is an incredible feat, uh, to see, uh, the energy and difficulty of just, uh, you know, stasis yes, damn, it was beautiful brilliantly said, absolutely I.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:I think I said that before the core strength needed to perform in a net is I mean, you know, if I can't handle a hammock, I have no idea how you can handle something. 25, 25 feet right, it's 25 feet in the air at the highest.
Rebecca Lazier:Well, these artists are incredible. They're coming from a background that unites them, experience experimental movement and aerial forms, and so they have a comfort level. They have a deep training and knowledge of those systems, of how to care for themselves at height. And, you know, we think a lot about risk taking in a way that isn't necessarily about just showing off what you could do at a height, but is about emphasizing that precarity. Like what is it for us all as an audience to feel on the edge of our seat? As if the ground is shifting, as Janet so beautifully said, as if the world is about to change. That edgeness, and then the surrender and the landing and the being together. And so I think it comes part of the essence of the work to be able to go to these edges where perhaps one might feel like they are in danger, and yet they've got their community there to support them and help them and bring a wholeness to the world.
Janet Echelman:And this is very emotional dance, one of the themes. You see dancers interact with one another one above the net, where their weight is sinking into the net, and then one hanging beneath them as they touch or grasp one another through this barrier as well. So there are so many complexities that are explored throughout the course of the performance.
Rebecca Lazier:And I think it's. To me the emotional ride of it isn't as important to trace as the sculptural ride, if you would, or the arc. Maybe we would want to say that there is joy, there's flying and there is sorrow and there is care, and how the dramaturgy of the piece maps out through the system, because the nets are suspended on pulleys that can each change, so we can. The sculpture completely changes the humans, the inhumans change the sculpture, so that interrelation isn't just between dancers but it's between the environment and humans.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:Now I'm curious, as I saw the nets a little earlier. There were multiple in your rehearsal space. Are there multiple nets? Am I understanding, or how many of these sculptures exist within this piece?
Rebecca Lazier:The sculpture is comprised of two nets that are almost imagined, pockets suspended that move together to create one unified sculpture we call them pillows.
Janet Echelman:But so think of it as four layers of a patterned painting that is made. There are four soft layers and two of them suspend dancers, but there is a volumetric airspace in between them, and so it. And then these layers can be lifted or lowered. So the whole sculpture in flux, not only as it changes with each body, as the feet put weight, or their back or buttocks and shoulders are changing the shape of the net, but the net itself also moves throughout the course of the performance. But the net itself also moves throughout the course of the performance.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:When you mentioned that they were called pillows, somehow my brain jumped from pillow to cloud and I have this vision of performers dancing among the clouds, and I don't know if that was intentional within the design, but it's what sprang to mind as soon as you said pillows.
Janet Echelman:I love that interpretation, and there are many. I mean, I often think of these as multiple spheres of being. You know, there's Dante's Inferno where you have, you know, go from the depths to the heavens. So there are multiple layers, and the dancers are also on the ground and the audience, um, is of course in that same space yes, I I mean the ideas of.
Rebecca Lazier:I think there's so many layers of imagery that I'll be so curious to hear what audiences say after the performances dancers in the sky, on clouds, as one might suggest, or on the bottom of the earth, or on an ocean, or I think there's environmental images and emotional images and all sorts of ways this piece can be entered. I think it's going to have interest to many different backgrounds young people, children. I think between the music and the visual world and the human world coming together, there is this interplay of form that is very exciting to witness.
Janet Echelman:Well, I want to underscore something Rebecca said about all ages, that this work is understandable and appeals to a really wide range, from children to every age of adult. But we also, on Saturday at 2 pm, have a relaxed performance that is suitable for a neurodiverse audience. So I think this is really the most open performance that we have engaged in. And Rebecca jump in here. Yes, yes.
Rebecca Lazier:Janet, thank you so much for remembering mentioning that and also the welcome the welcome to come to a performance, and a relaxed performance where you can come and go, where there's curious about these things to come and witness, and you don't have to be a dance lover or a circus lover to see this show. It's a, it's a genuine interest in what might happen when.
Janet Echelman:I want to mention one thing, which is we have the most incredible dancers. Most of them are coming from the dance world and many of them are also trained in circus and have performed with Cirque du Soleil. So there's this incredible, robust talent that is on display and I it, you know, very compelling Thank you so much for bringing that up.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:I think that's something I wanted to talk about the circus nature of the dance as well. If someone has seen Cirque du Soleil in the past, will they be expecting something similar, or is it just almost a nod to?
Rebecca Lazier:Yeah, I'll take that. That's an interesting question. I mean, I, I and the brilliance of Cirque du Soleil's early productions was that integration of music and dance and the ways in which the show flowed between things and the evocations of imagery. And I think our piece has that right. It has that similar music is propulsive, the set is constantly changing, the humans in it are doing these daring things. So I definitely think there's recognizable forms of awe, and yet what I work at choreographically is to keep the human really present. And so when we talk about circus, it's an incredible field of practices, and the field that we've really specialized in is the aerial form. And what is that to be in the air? What is it mean to be above ground? What does it mean to be between space and flying and landing? And so that will certainly be familiar to those in the audience, but it's experience in those forms, but also hopefully exciting and eye opening to those who do not have that experience and background.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:Rebecca, you mentioned the music and I think that's a good time to bring up your composer. So this piece was choreographed to an original score by French Canadian composer Joran, and I'd like to know at what point in the process? This again was a five year process, so at what point was the music introduced and do you know the inspiration behind this particular composition? I'm very curious as to the process.
Rebecca Lazier:Yes, yes, I do. Joran is an incredible cellist and vocalist and also works with electronics. She blends classical elements with folk elements uh, very much working at the intersection of forms musically. And so I was actually introduced to her. I had built the piece with a election of sound scores with my favorite composers from, you know, carolyn, carolyn Shaw and Tyone Braxton to others, and really felt like it was missing a thread. It was missing a heartbeat that carried us through a journey in the music.
Rebecca Lazier:And so I was introduced to Jeanne and went through her whole oeuvre and spoke to her and saw her in concert and she just watched some of our videos and composed a few tracks and they were so on point and then revealed something that the dance wasn't already doing.
Rebecca Lazier:And that's always such an incredible thing that I don't want the music to just mimic where we are, but to add another layer and add a depth of richness, like a good stock does in a soup. And so she came and was in residence with us this summer, summer when we had a four-week residency at PS21 in Chatham, new York, which was a peace-changing moment for the work, and she could come and improvise with us and go and create music in her studio and bring it back to us. So it really also was a layered collaboration that continues to the day. She's coming next week to be with us in studio again so we can really continue that process together and that's really a thrive on collaboration and to be able to have a composer so committed to the process and come and join us has been a gift.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:There's so much about this collaboration. I mean there must be. I know that CreativeX at Princeton University is involved here and actually you'll be having a talk back, I believe, after the February 7th performance, but I would love for you to touch on how engineering feats are being incorporated here, architectural feats. There's more than just the music and the performance and the sculpture. There's so much happening.
Rebecca Lazier:When Janet and I first met, we immediately knew we needed a relationship with an engineer to be able to solve this problem, right To be able to bring people to the nets.
Rebecca Lazier:And Sigrid Andresen is a professor of engineering at Princeton University and she specializes in tension-based structures and was immediately fascinated with so many questions that she brings to studying this, studying how movement moves through nets and how that can have applications across many, many fields. And so we were fortunate to do some work with her at the University of Washington in the architecture department's graduate school, and then more recently we had a residency at Princeton where engineer Bill Baker came and a mathematician, textile geometrist, came and Janet was there and riggers and three dancers and a grad student, so that we really took time to measure how forces move through the nets. And it was a remarkable coming together that both expanded the language the dancers had access to in describing things they had found intuitively and gave us new insights into how to rig these nets so that they behave both with stiffness and with flexibility and dynamics. So the coming together of these forms has been critical for us to be able to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible within the forms.
Janet Echelman:And we should mention that in 2020, we started to teach together. Sigrid, rebecca and I started commuting to New Jersey, to Princeton, to teach the atelier together, and that we were just gearing up when suddenly COVID-19 appeared and we had to adapt. Just like the dancers are adapting in the net, we also adapted in our process and found new ways to collaborate. And also we should mention that some of the engineering advisors on this project are the same people who, in New York City, advise Broadway for flying actors. So it's really a coming together of disparate fields in a very exciting way.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:I love that connection so much, and maybe this is a simplistic question, but as we're talking about collaboration, can I ask what about the act of collaboration? Brings you each joy?
Rebecca Lazier:I think at the heart of a collaboration is the relationship. It brings me great joy whenever I see Janet's name on my phone, whenever I talk to her, and I think part of what has kept this piece going is my respect and humble gratitude and just amazement at Janet's view of the world and her way in the world, and that's certainly the drivers of collaboration for me, because they allow me to go to new places as well.
Janet Echelman:I think the word I might pick is discovery, because it's like a good love relationship where you're discovering things that you would not have thought of by yourself and you know that's what's so exciting. You know the word collaboration is bandied about very frequently and I honestly think it's typically not real collaboration. For me, real collaboration is where I am so vulnerable that I am engaging in a way where I don't know where it's going to go. I'm engaging with things I don't know. I'm asking Rebecca, I'm asking Sigrid and the engineering team. You know what is possible asking Sigrid and the engineering team. You know what is possible. And you know I learn.
Janet Echelman:You know I've been making sculpture with fiber at the scale of buildings that you know they dance with the wind, hurricanes and you know every kind of weather. But I've never had the chance to collaborate with someone like Rebecca as a choreographer, and the dancers. So I had to change the nature of the fibers that I braid into twines and the thickness and the softness because of the dancers' feet. We tried different kinds and I had to change because this is a collaboration with human beings. This is not just the elements of nature, or at least climate and wind and snow and ice. So that has been a learning experience. But I think the key for me is that vulnerability to discover something I would not have thought of or known were it not for us to be collaborating. So it is creating something that would not exist were we not to make it together.
Rebecca Lazier:Brilliantly said Janet, I agree wholeheartedly.
Janet Echelman:Brilliantly said janet, I agree wholeheartedly I would not be putting humans in the nets without you. Well, I think the relationships are sort of the icing. It's like the wonderful thing. When people ask me you know, why are you spending, you know, all your time doing these crazy projects with choreographers, I say, well, it's the relationships. You know, we have become such dear friends and we have, you know, we have been workshopping in New Jersey, at Princeton, in Seattle Washington, in Halifax, nova Scotia, in Montreal, quebec, in Halifax, nova Scotia, in Montreal, quebec, and in, I mean I think they're oh, and then in New York, chatham, yeah, so it's really been this. You know ever-changing, the dancers also change which, and they bring a variety of backgrounds, from hip hop and street dancing, you know, to aerial artists and you know very classically trained dancers. So there's discovery happening and I think vulnerability in the process is really apparent in the outcome. That's where the surprises come.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:I was saying that I'm enamored of the fact that, janet, you brought up vulnerability as key to collaboration, because I think that what I love most about artists is their willingness to be vulnerable.
Rebecca Lazier:Yes, yes, Do you know the expression when you have children? They talk about how it's like walking with your heart outside of your body. I don't know who to credit this to, but I think of it similarly in art making. I think I've never felt as vulnerable as I do leading up to this premiere, in terms of so many layers coming together and between the nuances of the rigging and the needs of all elements cascading and coming together, and the lighting design is going to be incredible by Leanne Vardy, and so that investment and I love that expression.
Rebecca Lazier:You having children is like watching your heart walk outside of you and be apart from you, and yet you have to be okay with that. And it is like this with art too. It is a thing that is a letting go and it is a thing of nurture and it is a thing of becoming its own, being a bit of a mantra for us to be not afraid. You know it's be not if there's so many steps upon which you could become afraid, and yet we have to have that mantra to be able to move forward in the world.
Gina Marie Rodriguez:What a beautiful message. May we all remind ourselves. Moving forward. Be not afraid. Noli Tameri will celebrate their world premiere with three performances at McCarter Theater Center in Princeton from February 7th through February 8th. For tickets and more information, be sure to visit mccarterorg. If you liked this episode, be sure to review, subscribe and tell your friends. A transcript of this podcast, links relevant to the story and more about the arts in New Jersey can be found at JerseyArts. com. The Jersey Arts Podcast is presented by Art Pride New Jersey, advancing a state of creativity since 1986. The show was co-founded by and currently supported by, funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. This episode was hosted, edited and produced by me, Gina Marie Rodriguez. Executive producers are Jim Atkinson and Isaac Serna-Diez, and my thanks to Rebecca Lazier and Janet Echelman for speaking with me today. I'm Gina Marie Rodriguez for the Jersey Arts Podcast. Thanks for listening.
