The Catskill Chronicle

Story and photos by Ted Waddell

[LACKAWAXEN, PA] – “I believe that a reality without war is absolutely necessary for our culture right now,” said Tannis Kowalchuk, artistic director of NACL Theatre in Highland, NY. On Sunday, September 13, she led a group of white-clad women and girls in performing “Butorides” an outdoor dance in celebration of the green heron, overlooking the tranquil Upper Delaware River just a stone’s throw downstream of the historic Roebling Bridge.

The co-founder of the North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL) gathered
together an “all-ages group of girls and women” to dance a theatre performance on a series of terraces above the shimmering riffles of the river as part of the Green Heron Poetry Project, “Hope in the River – Celebrating the Return of the Green Heron.”

The dance performance was overlaid with many symbolic layers, from the silky sensuality of womanhood to the tragic foretelling of futures squandered by those who fail to protect the environment, and to a sense of universal hope, as in the end, the members of the dance ensemble invited the audience to join them at river’s edge and toss wish-laced flowers into the water.

The river-side performance event featured Kowalchuk, Karen Smith, Pearl Smith, Janice Zwail, Lee Ehman, Cass Collins, Robin Dodson, Mary Greene, Rebecca Acker, and Sarah Maurice Acker-Krzywicki.

Kowalchuk said the work of dance was created in response to the project’s theme of creating your own reality, and was named “Butorides” by her association of the Latin word for heron with the Japanese name ‘butoh’, the name for “an intense and beautiful form of a very slow dance that emerged in Japan after the terrible A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

To construct the foundation of the dance, Kowalchuk asked each performer to bring in a couple of pictures of a sculpture of a human body in a dynamic position, and these visual inspirations were subsequently used to fashion the dance sequences.

Before the dance took to the natural stage setting, a trio of drummers, Tom Holmes, Maya Mary Herbert and Tom Doheny, proceeded the dancers to the rock terraces, and accompanied their performance with drum sounds reverberating off the both sides of the scenic river.

In the wake of the dance, the musicians led the gathering across the bridge over to the Roebling View, the local home of the Margolis Brown Adaptors Company (MBAC), a physical theatre company established in NYC in 1984 by Kari Margolis and Tony Brown. The Margolis Method “centers on the dramatic force and emotion that emanate from an actor’s physicality, uniting instinct and intellectual analysis” takes inspiration from the work of Etienne Decroux, Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski.

To view more photos or to purchase prints from Butorides – Dance in Celebration of Peace and the Green Heron visit the Chronicle on Zenfolio.