INTERVIEW: Jody Sperling uses climate change as inspiration for dance

Photo: Wind Rose, choreographed by Jody Sperling, is part of a new climate change-focused series of works from Sperling and composer Matthew Burtner. Photo courtesy of Phyllis McCabe / Provided by Michelle Tabnick PR with permission.

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Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance are set to use the Earth and its uncertain future as inspiration for an upcoming choreographic work in New York City. Melting Ice/Changing Winds: Dance and Music of Climate Change will be presented April 8-10 at The Center at West Park’s Sanctuary Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The dance piece is another project spearheaded by Sperling and composer Matthew Burtner. Audiences can expect to witness Wind Rose, a world premiere that visualizes wind patterns along the Earth’s atmosphere. The title of the piece comes from a meteorological instrument that measures wind speed, and the five dancers at each performance will make a human wind rose for the audience to experience.

Also on the bill is the return of Ice Cycle from 2015, a piece inspired by Sperling’s own dancing in the Arctic. The finale is Northern Sky, which features Sperling, solo, whirling around “in a meditative journey toward transcendence.”

Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Sperling about the climate change-focused work. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.

What’s the collaboration like between you and composer Matthew Burtner?

When you find someone who unleashes a part of your soul that you never knew existed, that is a good collaboration. With Matthew, I make work that goes beyond what I could dream up on my own.

Our collaboration began with Ice Cycle. I had just come back from the Arctic and was searching for a musical collaborator who could help me tell the story of sea ice. Voila, Matthew! Raised in the far north of Alaska, he specializes in music of ice and snow. He often takes data and materials of climate change and renders that into compositional form.

With Wind Rose we found a fun flip-flop way of working together. I choreographed a sequence of moves, each with a specific rhythm and sound related to breath and atmosphere. I then sent these moves to Matthew on Post-It notes. He then arranged these into a fugue, creating a sound-movement score.

Essentially, I made the sounds, and he composed the dance. The result is an integration of movement, rhythm, sound and breath that neither one of us could have envisioned in advance.

Why has climate change inspired so much of your recent work?

The climate forecast is very dire. If you are not paying attention, then you are either very ignorant or in denial, which is most of us most of the time just getting through our daily lives. The changes that are happening now — and those that await us — are so vast that everything we know will need to be remade to survive, this includes ourselves and our psyches.

Every person, whatever their work or craft, can (and must) process climate change in their life. So if you are an accountant, you can become an accountant of sustainability. If you study literary theory, you are probably theorizing about climate change. I am a dancemaker, and I’m responding to this situation by making dances.

I believe strongly in the power of dance to move people, to cultivate empathy and provoke action. In order to address the climate catastrophe we need to come together and build solutions. Live performance has the positive aspect of drawing people away from their devices and gathering them in spaces where they can be stimulated into embodied ways of thinking.

Part of the reason we are not paying attention to climate change is that we live in such controlled environments — literally ‘climate-controlled’ — we don’t notice how hot it’s getting. Art helps us better attune our senses, perhaps getting us to notice these shifts more viscerally.

Thinking about climate change doesn’t have to be only depressing. A world where we address climate change is, necessarily, a much better world than we inhabit now — more just, equitable, peaceful, etc. The act of envisioning this better world — and doing what you can to make it a reality — is what motivates me to make art and keep going.

What can audience members expect from Wind Rose?

I was curious to make a dance that revealed the patterns of atmospheric motion. Air with 400 ppm CO2 doesn’t look any different from air with 200 ppm, even though this concentration is wreaking havoc on our planet. We see air in its influence on other things, such as when a gust sweeps up a plastic bag or a cyclone destroys a building.

In Wind Rose five dancers in white dresses walk shoulder-to-shoulder pivoting around each other in a circle. As they speed up, they collectively create a wind turbine. If you’re sitting in the first few rows you’ll be able to feel a draft as they sweep past. They manifest the wind in other ways, too. They whip the air with their costumes, creating sculptural forms that are evocative of clouds while vocalizing with whistling hisses. While this is happening, Matthew plays a rotary fan with a feather to create a whirring rhythm, and he mixes in electronic sounds culled from wind data.

When you hear a story about climate change or another subject, how can you tell it will be adaptable for the stage?

I can’t just hear a story and then make a dance about it. I has to be my story — or more accurately, it has to become my story. Part of my process is spending time experiencing the element I’m interested in (eg. ice or wind) and echoing its movement (eg. crystallizing, melting, gusting, cycloning, etc). I don’t create straight narratives, but rather am seeking to conjure the dynamic aspects of our natural world in a stage environment. So, for me the work is in finding the empathetic connection between human bodies and geophysical phenomena.

What was it like to dance in the Arctic? What brought you there?

It was a transformative experience. Being from New York City, I’m used to being surrounded by people and buildings and concrete. When I danced in the Arctic, I was moving alone on a vast open expanse of sea ice — that’s a thin layer of ice … over the Chukchi Sea (north of Alaska).

All around you is white — white ice, white sky — with the thin line of the horizon being your visual guidepost. You feel totally insignificant, and that’s liberating! I worked with camouflaging myself in the environment, like wildlife, so that I could become seamlessly a part of it.

There is a passage in Ice Cycle that comes directly out of my experience of trying to blend in with the horizon. I had I wanted to make a piece relating to the Arctic and was fortunate enough to meet oceanographer Robert Pickart, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who invited me to join a six-week polar science mission. I’m still mining my research ‘data’ from that expedition and am eager to get back out in the field.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Ice/Changing Winds: Dance and Music of Climate Change, featuring Wind Rose, Ice Cylce and Northern Sky, will play April 8-10 at The Center at West Park’s Sanctuary Theater in New York City. The work is presented by Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance. Click here for more information and tickets.