Dixon Place to Present The World Premiere Of INTERGLACIAL By Laura Peterson

In the piece, four dancers transform an icy landscape into 12-foot sculptures evoking a terrain inhabited and ultimately overwhelmed by cleaving glaciers.

By: Chloe Rabinowitz Oct. 29, 2021

Dixon Place to Present The World Premiere Of INTERGLACIAL By Laura Peterson Image

Dixon Place will present the world premiere of Interglacial by Laura Peterson from December 8-11, 2021 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $18 in advance ($21 at the door) and can be purchased online at http://dixonplace.org/performances/interglacial/.

Interglacial is a new multidisciplinary dance work through which choreographer Laura Peterson explores the urgent topic of global climate emergency, inspired by minimalist geometric art and Land Art of the 1960s and '70s. A dance and visual art installation project, Interglacial is about deep time and the dynamics of nature that is designed to create a space for reflection on human impacts on the Arctic region of the earth and to encourage climate activism. In the piece, four dancers transform an icy landscape into 12-foot sculptures evoking a terrain inhabited and ultimately overwhelmed by cleaving glaciers.

"In Interglacial, I am trying to understand the devastating effects humans have had on our environment," said choreographer and Artistic Director of Open Arts Studio Laura Peterson. "I'm exploring the intersection of the human body with landscapes and non-human phenomena. This work has a particular focus on the qualities of time, from the hyperspeeds of the digital world to the impossibly slow travels of a glacier across a continent, as it drags rocky material toward the sea."

Interglacial dwells in a space of cognitive dissonance between the many thousands of years that span a glacial period, and the hyper-accelerated progress of environmental destruction. The current interglacial period has lasted 11,000 years and whether there will ever be another ice age on Earth is a topic of current scientific debate. Things that were once predictable, like rainfall patterns, are now on a roulette wheel. This project explores how somewhere deep in our bones we may have an imprint of Earth's geological slow dance, incremental shifts over eons, and now we are literally witness to a dizzying enactment of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, species death, and rising sea levels via news media and lived experiences.