Soppi / Change

This performance was created while in residency at RAIR in North Philadlephia, a recycling center, where the artists work with recycled materials directly from the drop offs. This work is in direct response to the site and we transformed materials which then we transformed again in relation with an audience and performance offering at Icebox Space. 

Performance materials construction and design and dance by: Esther Baker and Bamba Diagne

Video by: Esther Baker 

Video edited by: Windega Tarpaga

Photos by Ashley Smith

In this performance installation we wear large upcycled sculptures. Our dance is a moving meditation on change, water cycles, and migration. The audience is immersed in video and participatory actions. This transnational collaboration is supported from a residency at RAIR. Esther and Bamba met in Senegal in 2004 when Esther was a guest choreographer in Dakar. In June 2023 we collaborated with La Ville En Mouvment/Propelled Animals on a large-scale performance procession in Oakham, Senegal. We built costumes and portable installations from recycled materials such as recycled plastic water bags and bottles, aluminum cans, used clothing and bags, fabric, wires, tree branches, and leaves. While in residency at RAIR we are making sculptures with recycled materials from around the region and a daily physical practice next to Lenape Sippue/Delaware River. Both our work intersects with nature and recycling. In Senegal, recycling is integrated into society out of economic necessity. Recycling is the norm and is integrated into daily living in the family, the market, and the arts. This is in contrast to North Americans producing the most garbage per family in the world. We are interested in learning more about Philly culture by looking at the items that are recycled at RAIR and creating a performance in response to the materials activating with video, sound, dance, and installation.

cannonballfestival.org

Run Time: 30 mins

Ticket Price: $25

Venue: Icebox Project Space Gallery

Dates: September 2, 2024 - September 6, 2024

About the Artist

Esther Baker (MA, MFA UCLA) is a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, parent, educator, and massage therapist. She co-organizes projects that are multidisciplinary, site-responsive, and collectively derived; aiming for an ethic of shared leadership and decolonizing practices. She recently performed at NJafane Festival and La Ville En Mouv’ment in Dakar, Senegal. In April she organized Lenape Sippu: call her by her name, an Earthday event with Painted Bride and the year prior with Philadelphia Contemporary at Washington Avenue Green with dance, drumming, storytelling, free chair massages, and a litter pick-up alongside Lenape Sippu/Delaware River. She is co-founder of Propelled Animals, MAP Grant, USAI Grant recipients, and incubated artist at Headlong. She is part of the Interdisciplinary Artist Consortium and is an Adjunct at Temple University. She performed at Palmerin Festival, Senegal, The Schuylkill Center, ArtYard NJ, No New Idols Festival in Riga, Latvia, Lynden Sculpture Gardens, The Englert Theater, Wassaic Festival NY, InsideOut Festival, Burkina Faso, and Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh.

BAMBA DIAGNE is a visual artist and dancer based in Dakar, Senegal. He worked with multiple artists in the cadre of the Biennale of Dakar. He also collaborated with Keur Thiossane Marion Sylla in a project of OIM (organization internationale des immigrants) which created installations in the régions of Senegal. He danced for ten years with Cie 1ere Temps by Andreya Ouamba and Fatou Cissé. He worked with Propelled Animals in La Ville en Mouv’ment. He presented solo ''Contraint'' in the Cool jam festival in Casablanca and Rabat. He performed at the French Institute Creation “Le Bal du Cercle” at Pavillon Noir and Festival D’Avignon. He presented “TOXU” at Belluard Bollwerk festival Switzerland. He worked with Studio Kabako and Cie Panaibra. He is a batik artist and studied at Soumbédioune Art School in Dakar.

Writing by: Ellen Chenoweth

The clock in the studio at the waste recycling center where Esther and Bamba are working is broken. It says 9:03 and I don’t know what time it is, but I know that’s not right. There is a deeper rightness though. Other timescales are at work here besides the 24 hours in a day cycle.

When we arrive on this particular day, it’s a Sunday. I’ve gotten a ride with Esther Baker and Bamba Diagne, who are in the middle of a four-week residency at RAIR, Esther coming from South Philly and Bamba coming from Dakar, Senegal. A few RAIR staff are lounging outside with a carefree insouciance, giving a solid impression of people with all the time in the world, despite having hosted a public performance in the morning and having artists in the space in the afternoon and probably a million other things that come with running an artist residency site out of a dump. RAIR’s values of informality and being open without prescription are already on display. Esther’s car needs a jump. It’s not a problem. We’re rolling again.

It's an intense space, dirty and dangerous. Esther tells me it’s a hundred times more intense during the week, when trucks are coming in and out, bringing in 550 tons of waste each day. “It’s all rush rush rush dump dump dump. It’s a space of physical labor, a working people’s space. A creative working space resonates differently.” Bamba describes their sourcing process at the site, “Wood, iron, sand – man needs a lot of things. We don’t have to go anywhere to buy things. There’s always surprises. We’re working with what’s here. ‘Oooh, this is interesting, I can use this.’ Here everything you could need is at your disposal, you just have to use your brain.”

Esther and Bamba are building a piece that will be performed at the Icebox, as part of the Cannonball festival during Fringe. (They’re building the dance components of the work at Headlong studios, a space more conducive to rolling on the ground.) Bamba tells me a lot of people ask him what kind of artist he is, as I have just done, and he kindly rejects the question. “I’m an artist and it depends on the context. I do batik dying, sculpture, working with wire, wood, choreographing… there are a lot of things crossing and all of it is art.”

Esther and Bamba first crossed paths in 2004 at a workshop in Senegal, and both artists share an interest in improvisation in performance and working with recycled objects. “This was an opportunity to really collaborate [with Esther] and it’s a big pleasure to do it. Not only the opportunity but how I was able to see another world.” Bamba has trained and worked with choreographers Fatou Cissé and Andréya Ouamba (who collaborated with Reggie Wilson on The Good Dance—Dakar/Brooklyn, after Wilson traveled to Senegal on a Guggenheim Fellowship). Cissé, he both performed and built costumes for the group, and always kept a practice in sculpture while dancing.

Esther has been going to Senegal for nearly three decades, where she trained in social dance styles such as such as Sabar, Mbalax, Funana, and Zouk. “It’s been a really influential place in my life.” She also has decades of experience of working in close partnerships with other artists, including La Pocha Nostra and Propelled Animals. “Through my previous collaborations, I’ve learned when to slow down, when to move back, when to spark a fire, when to follow, and when to let go. This collaboration is messy, there’s a lot of listening, provoking, joking, like brother and sister, and then there’s a collaboration with the materials. There’s a transformation of the materials that’s direct action in a sense.”

If there were a clock at the Icebox, it would be broken too.

Soppi (Change) opens in the dark. I can sense the presences of two people swishing past me but I can’t see much. A large man swaddled in layers approaches. This section goes on long enough that I can settle into the space and put away distracting thoughts from outside. I can inhale and exhale and be present. There’s the sound of a wind chime, birds chirping, a dog, a rooster.

When the lights come up a bit, we can marvel at the costume sculptures. Bamba looks as if he has stepped back from the future with silver glasses and a tangle of wires forming a protective suit, mirroring his hair, locs arranged in short spikes, black skin and blue batiked fabric emerging from the coil. Esther has become a mobile garden, foliage sprouting where the head usually is and layers of bright orange and pink material creating a cloud puff around her body. There are dualities that are done and undone: masculine and feminine, black and white, organic and synthetic, warm colors and cool colors. But the lines are crisscrossed and blurred throughout, and a simple unison phrase done by both dancers pulls them together. Both are strong presences, clearly experienced in pulling the eye and commanding attention.

Esther passes out gorgeous indigo batiked fabrics around the audience, each person getting one. They have come from somewhere unknown, used and then discarded, found their way to the dump, were seen, plucked from the masses of waste, transformed into something extraordinary, and now are being shared with each of us. I am happy to hold my fabric, but when the instruction comes to toss it in the air, I do not feel like complying. I feel like I can get the gist by watching others toss their fabric in the air and I don’t always like to follow directions, inside a performance or outside. But the section goes on long enough that I give in and start throwing my fabric high above my head. It turns out to be satisfying. And the fabric behaves unexpectedly; it goes much higher than I thought and does interesting things on the way down. The effect is something like being surrounded by water while on land, with the sound of waves, video of the ocean, and my own body gently coaxed into a repetitive motion.

When they start shedding costume material, it’s like they are coming out of cocoons, but not like butterflies. They were free and powerful before and they are free and powerful now. They have morphed into a look you might call apocalyptic business casual, playing a game with an edge. There is a loose undercurrent of danger in this space as well, a ghost carried over from the dump. There are still materials that could hurt you. A glittery Eagles flag emerges, a semaphore of support and place. Esther and Bamba are rolling over each other, a truck is rolling over them on the video screen. These bodies may be powerful, but they’re also fragile. There’s the sound of waves and then sounds of the dump; the dump becomes the ocean. Bamba is shaking, receiving, bouncing, while Esther is gathering items for a flower altar. The multitude of sites and histories and sounds and colors become a blur. There is a transformation of materials from trash to art, but also a very real transformation of energy, from mundane to crackly and potent.

After the languorous beginning, the end comes and goes in a flash, leaving us with one crystallized image. Each dancer is standing in a plastic box with red and white caution tape, their feet in water. Each one is holding a plastic bag of water, drinking from it and spraying water on each other. They are dousing themselves, and then they are gone.