Art Yard: We are the River

Creatd in collaboration with Gerard Minaya and Emma White Thunder at ArtYard in Frenchtown, New Jersey October 2019

We Are The River

We are the River is a site-responsive performance created by Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Gerard Minaya, and Emma White Thunder incorporating installation, music, and video in a meditation on nature, interconnectedness and the history of place and displacement along the river which connects the Catskills through Frenchtown and Philadelphia to the ocean. Created during a two-week residency at ArtYard, We are the River commenced with dancers crossing the Frenchtown Bridge to Lenape Park and continued in a procession to the ArtYard theater, ending with a communal lantern walk to the River’s Edge. Four local dancers chosen from the community accompanied the joyous procession and acted as guides. This work is an offering of kindness and connectedness in response to the anger and aggression of our times.

With community members: Jessica Goodale, John Augustine, Bonnie Pariser, Manny Lopez

“All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really

one.” –Black Elk

Our understanding of the world around us has been heavily dictated by settler culture.

We are left isolated and disconnected from each other and nature. Our project asks how

can we better listen, learn, and dance with each other and the environment. For

example, trees communicate with each other through their root systems. The Delaware

River or Lenapewihittuk, River of the Lenape, runs from the Catskills to Frenchtown to

Philadelphia to the ocean. Nature provides examples of interconnectedness. 

Collaborators:  

Emma Lynn Rose White Thunder was born in Port Townsend, Washington. Raised by a single mother she is the youngest of four siblings,two brothers and a sister. Living mostly in the Pacific Northwest, the family had traveled back to South Dakota when she was young to visit her father on the Pine Ridge reservation. Emma received a full scholarship to attend The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, where she acquired a BFA. Her work explores themes of depression,sexual trauma, self acceptance, anxiety, isolation/loneliness and their antitheses. Looking at the feeling of a memory, she pulls from the strong range of emotions that it evokes; Using a variety of familiar materials, she then translates these emotions into physical objects. 

Gerard Minaya is a first generation Dominican-American, Bronx native, Queer-Afro-Latino dance artist who’s inspired by movement pathology that exists, collides, and possibly move through generations. Upon receiving his BFA in Dance at University of the Arts, Gerard has presented his work at WeWork’s Harlem Renaissance: A Night of Poetry, Panoply Performance Laboratory, The Iron Factory, and BAAD! Bronx

Academy of Arts and Dance. He was also featured in Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, A Dance Company’s work, “Truth Don Die”, at the Bric House Theater. Gerard is a current company member with Ballet Hispanico’s BHdos and Curet Performance Project.

Photos by HBru Photos.