STRANGE NATURE
WITH HANA VAN DER KOLK AND LEA KIEFFER
SEPTEMBER 26 - OCTOBER 5
What might be revealed by touching, listening to, looking at, being deeply with a shell, a glittery garment, a fallen log turned home for an ecosystem? How might these intimate encounters be felt and expressed through our bodies? And how might they change how we conceive of our bodies all together? What are the dances, rituals, practices, new ecosystems, tributes that emerge from here?
In this week long collaborative workshop anchored in group ritual, engaging body, attention, and imagination-centering practices, and passionate and uncanny encounters with objects, landscape, and costume, we will “dialogue” with ourselves, one another, and everything to ask: how and why might we become more tender, more monstrous, more clairvoyant, more fluid; recognizing/uncovering our already multiple, hybrid, contradictory, messy, monstrous selves, groupings, world in the process.
In 2025 we gather near the autumnal equinox and will welcome the decay/transformation that comes with autumn, acknowledge and look for intimacy with (our) shadows and (our) beasts, locate and dance with/as our alter egos, invite hard conversations, and practice softness/forgiveness. Dancers, artists, writers, schemers, activists, healers, and aspiring/inspiring freaks, come join us in play, risk, and world-making.
Guided by dancers, makers, researchers, and facilitators Lea Kieffer and Hana van der Kolk, Strange Nature began at the Field Center in 2022 with the curatorial and match making vision of Field Center founder Jared Williams, and reconvened in 2023 and 2024.
EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION OPEN NOW!
SCHOLARSHIP | WORK TRADE | PAYMENT PLAN
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We offer 3 full scholarships for Black, Indigenous and People of Color [BIPOC] folks in each session. As well as 3 Work Trade spots in each session. If interested please select 'BIPOC Scholarship' ticket OR 'Work Trade' ticket when registering via the link below. For more information about the work trade exchange, please see Work Exchange.
CLICK HERE to register with a Payment Plan.
REFUND POLICY: Full refunds available up to 10 days prior to the event. Please inform us if you cannot attend an event up to 10 days prior [including Scholars and Work Traders]! Refunds within the 10 days prior to the event may be available on a case-by case basis, please reach out to communications@thefieldcenter.com
ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
Photo by Eva Fang
Hana van der Kolk is a queer dancer, artist, and embodied learning, ritual, and celebration facilitator living on unceded Mohican, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee lands, colonially known as the Hudson Valley, New York. Hana spends time looking for and co-creating bridges through pedagogy, performance, language, healing, celebration, transformation, and the dismantling of empire inside and out. They create performances, organize parades and parties, design and lead workshops, offer one-on-one counseling & sex and gender expansion work, write, and makes videos and objects for enchantment. Hana sees their work—which is always collaborative—as a conduit for knowing/unknowing what is here and now, for remembering and practicing intimacy at many proximities.
Hana has worked internationally as a teacher and facilitator, performer, and artist since 2001. They completed an MFA in Dance from UCLA in 2008 and a practice-based PhD in Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2022 where their dissertation focused on queer friendship, telepathy, and somatic technologies for re-enchantment and recovery from the delusion of separateness. Hana has been dancing/studying dance and performance since they were 3 years old. Some of their core influences in this journey have been Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, Body Weather Laboratory, queer and Black social dance, teachers Jennifer Monson, Keith Hennessy, Sherwood Chen, KJ Holmes, Simone Forti, Susan Foster, debra bluth, d. Sabela grimes and many others, and learning, adapting, and performing dances by Deborah Hay from 2000-2007. In addition, Hana has been meditating and studying Buddhist philosophy since 1998, most extensively in Thai Forest and Burmese lineages. They are also trained in and work creatively with the Internal Family Systems method, are trained in and practice Barbara Carrellas’ Urban Tantra work, have studied DREAMWORK with Mala Kline, and consider themselves a practitioner of animism.
Hana is part of the FlagsSs Day Collective in Troy, NY with Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press. The project works in traditions of entwining celebration and challenge, protest with party, and dissent with a dedication to joy, and organizes parades, rituals, and community flag-making workshops. Hana has collaborated with/is closely in conversation with Erica Dawn Lyle, Tomislav Feller, Sondra Loring, margit galanter, Dori Midnight, Eli Nixon, Julia Handschuh, Lailye Weidman, Erin Sickler, Jason Martin, Sean Desiree, Asher Woodworth, Ethan Keirmaier, Ellen Foster, taisha paggett, Nikola Knežević and others. Hana has been working with Lea Kieffer on the immersive workshop experience Strange Nature since 2022.
Léa Kieffer is a French freelance performer, dancer, costume designer and scenographer. Based for 12 years in Berlin, she recently re-located in the french mountains in Alsace in an old textil factroy among artistic “Collectif des possibles”. Her work explores the dialogue between imagination and physicality, entangling dance, bodywork, storytelling, and material craft. Lea is fascinated by organic and produced objects, bodies, and textiles. She obsessively studies their materiality in order to unveil the unseen, provoke the absurd, and invite the magical. In this process, Lea grounds the ephemeral and imaginary with the here and now of bodies and material things, creating uncanny combinations and speculative fictions. She often works in collaboration and with improvisation.
Since 2017, Lea has been developing Sci Fi Anatomy (SFA), a somatic, participatory storytelling and sound experience. In an SFA session, Lea draws on scientific and imaginary facts about the human body, more-than-human creatures, the planet earth, and the cosmos to weave a fantastical, humoristic, and highly imaginal journey through various times, states, relationships, and spaces. Since 2020, Lea has explored phantasmagoric aquatic-cosmic worlds through interactive events, a collection of costumes and objects, performances for the stage and other sites, and Sci-Fi Anatomy sessions. Currently Lea is developing Mermix with longtime collaborator Rocio Marano, a participatory performance for kids focused on cosmic-aquatic worlds and set in immersive and interactive scenographies. With Timothée Nay and Jamika Ajalon, she is touring and continuing to develop RADIO WHALES, a site-responsive performance and installation featuring costumes, scenography, sound, and movement.
With a background in craft, Lea also designs clothing, costumes, sets, and environments from upcycled materials. She sees clothing as an extra layer of matter that meets the matter of our bodies, an extension that transforms the physicality and performativity of the one who wears it. With her sets and environments, Lea likewise aims to facilitate an intimate and animate reciprocity between humans and materials, challenging the subject/object divide and inviting those who meet the work to enter a dynamic and improvisational encounter. She embraces the limitations of materials both in terms of what is available in a given location on a given budget, and in terms of the materials’ physical specifications and the histories and associations they provoke. Lea loves disassembling, reassembling, and altering materials, finding the treasures in the discarded and leftover and looking for new constellations and configurations. Lea plays between having a vision for a final outcome and allowing the materials to collaborate on surprising aesthetic and emotional layers.
Léa’s work has been shared in venues such as Sophienseale, Gropius Bau, Dock 11, ICI in Berlin, Charleroi Danse Bruxelles, FFT Dusseldorf among other contexts.
Lea also collaborated as dancer and/or costume scenography maker with Schubot & Gradinger, Jeremy Shaw, Isabel Lewis, Frida Giulia Franceschini, Jule Flierl, Cécile Bally & Cathy Walsh, Stephanie Auberville, Mathilde Monfreux, Hermann Heissig, Claire Vivianne Sobottke and Siegmar Zacharias.
Together with Hanna van Der Kolk, they are developing “STRANGE NATURE” at the Field Center since 2022.