Moving North: engaging community with place through dance

Abstract

Moving North used postmodern dance as an aesthetic and experiential entry point for engaging community with questions about how people experience north as a place and direction, and how the pole figures in systems of mapping. Moving North sponsored workshops for Anchorage residents culminating in a site-specific performance that traveled across the University of Alaska, Anchorage campus. The workshops established distinct ways of approaching movement corresponding to the difference between conceptions and perceptions, producing a set of experiential exercises that could be replicated in studies of embodiment, and investigations of how mapping systems can affect a sense of place. Moving North used active experimentation to combine representational and nonrepresentational approaches to understanding.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Doug Causey and UAA's International Polar Year program, John Bainbridge, Buzz Schwall, the Frazier and Edgecombe families, Alaska Dance Theater, Jill Crosby, and UAA's Department of Theatre and Dance for supporting the Moving North project; NIM and Hilde Rustad for the opportunity to continue the research in Norway; Julie Decker and Mark Carper for the opportunity to perform Moving North as part of Anchorage's Freeze Festival, 2010; the Vellexon Underscore Study Group for inviting me to participate in the 2007 session at Casina Settarte, Apulia, Italy; as well as Tinu Hettich, Caroline Waters, and the other Moving North participants.