External Organ
External Organ is a cumulative creative research project yielding methods, workshops and performances grappling with organs, organisms, and organization through the lenses of climate breakdown, ecology, and relationship. Body is approached as the conduit between, our experience of, and our organization within and throughout, our worlds. Therefore, the body is necessary when processing our relationship with environment, ecologies, climate, and change. Questions are posed and embodied by performers, workshop participants, and audiences, spanning between large impossibilities to immediately graspable: how do we see ourselves inside of extinction and recuperation? How do we muster reluctant optimism in effort to reframe demise? How do we get to know our neighbors, including non-humans? What do these relationships yield? What have we forgotten? How can we remember?
Like a functioning ecosystem, the iterations within “External Organ” exist independently but inherently inform one another. Current folds within the compounding research include:
Performances such as “Earth Rushes Up” (2019) “Seed” (2020) and “skating the edge” (2021)
Installations such as “A Model for Staying With” (in process)
Methods such as True Tone, Memory Welling, and Re-membering
Workshops such as “Neighbors and Neighborhoods” and “Modeling”
Intersections
A Model for Staying With
A Model for Staying With is a multidisciplinary installation designed for audiences to consider our roles as individuals among our ecological community. The installation lives in and on sculptures that simultaneously resemble the waste left behind when a large building falls, a monolith, and a terrarium. Integrated sound, light and video call to the audience
Earth Rushes Up
Earth Rushes Up is a contemporary solo performance branching out of bjp’s newest research vein titled External Organ. Within these processes we are grappling with organs, organisms, and organization through the lens of sustainability and climate change. As the first performative germination of this body of work, Earth Rushes Up utilizes reframing as a method to conjure reluctant optimism in the face of the climate crisis.
skating the edge
skating the edge is a performance workshop that dances at the seams of personification and actualization. .Dancers will workshop and perform a score involving natural history, popular science, and memory while questioning what’s at stake in metaphor. Within “skating the edge” dancers can expect: expansive, highly textural dancing directed in both solo and group rehearsals; inroads to content through discussions, both of texts and with guest scientists, horticulturalists, arborists, designers; performing a combination of improvised and sequenced choreographic material.
Credits
Direction and Choreography by Britta Joy Peterson
Music by Derek Blackstone
Lighting Design by Evan Anderson
Performance and Choreographic Collaboration by Emily Ames, Amanda Blythe, Malik Burnett, Carolyn Hoehner, Dylan Lambert, Annie Peterson, Vyette Tiya, Zoe Wampler
Research Contribution by Jamal Abrams, Lucillia Ayla, Sarah Brennecke, Kourtney Clements, Michela Dwyer, Krissy Harris, Tyreis Hunte, Gabriel Mata, Erika Martin, Robert Priorie, and Meera Safford
Co-Produced by Olivia Weber
Images by Zachary Handler
Video by Bria Granville