UNLOCK: treewaterland

Photos by Hailey Bruinsma

UNLOCK: Tree Water Land

Organized and Conceptualized by: Esther Baker-Tarpaga

Propelled Animals at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education

August 6, 2021 6:00 p.m. EST

We adapt our projects and processes to address the specific needs of the communities they engage. For this project at the Schuylkill Center Propelled Animals collective members Esther Baker, Raquel Monroe, and Heidi Wiren Bartlett were in residence. Guest collaborators: artists Tchin of We Are the Seeds, Crux, and Emma White Thunder.

UNLOCK: Tree Water Land seeks to build on the movements and social protests of Black Lives Matter and Water is Life. Our performance challenges Western linear notions of time and embrace circularity, we are past, present, and future. This piece is home outside, in Nature, and in public spaces. UNLOCK will include dance, ephemeral interactive installations, live music, and guided embodied experiences for the audiences to witness and join. We will roam and lead a guided procession centering environmental justice, anti-racism, and healing lineages.

We will develop UNLOCK during several creation residencies at the Schuylkill Center. Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Propelled Animals co-founder and choreographer, has worked at the Center as an environmental educator for three years; this project builds on that experience and the Center’s environmental initiatives in collaboration with our creative decolonization processes. We are partnering with We Are The Seeds and guest artist Tchin, an award-winning storyteller and musician based in Lenapehoking. It should be noted that the Schuylkill is a regional watershed from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, and Delaware to New York.