Join our Lopez Library Artist in Residence, Elena Zubulake for “ODE TO THE WILD” Land Based Art and Performance Workshops.
5 Tuesdays @ 6 pm – 8:30 beginning June 3 – July 1st in the Community Room at the Library. All ages welcome, with children under 13 accompanied by an adult. Participants don’t have to attend every workshop, but are encouraged to. Please read on for more details!
Please RSVP to reserve your space to nikyta@lopezlibrary.org.
Workshop Description:
An old woman sits in a cave at the edge of time, weaving the threads of the world. Every so often she gets up and stirs the grand cauldron of all the seeds boiling away on her fire. Can you feel it’s heat? The trickster crow who sits watching in a dark corner flies over and out of curiosity or maybe mischief untangles her weaving. She looks back, sighs, and picks up one bright thread and begins again.
This has happened before. It will happen again.
What thread will you pick up, when the trickster undoes the whole weave of everything? When things fall apart? Or maybe you are the trickster crow, unraveling the threads to make something new?
This is a invitation to pick up a thread. Or unwind a thread.
Come stew up some mythopoetic ensemble creative madness with Elena Zubulake, the artist is residence at the library this month. We will weave with body, story, magic, ritual, that will culminate in some kind of offering at First Saturday Art Walk on July 5, 2025.
Ensemble work is it’s own magic. We don’t start with a script but with one another. Our Mind of an Actor, our Heart of a Poet, our Body of a Gymnast.
Come one or all. Elena with suggest some ingredients to get things cooking, lead some physical theatre stuff, and allow a lot of space for creative juiciness of the moment and co-creation. We will spend time outside. Have an experience, a creation, a conversation with land, fish, bird, or sea.
The result? Who knows, but it will be fun and inspiring (in fact, the process is really the point).
At this moment and very subject to change (tricker crow) in this ever fluid form, Elena is interested in following the threads of relation to land and history/herstory/theirstory (which she is researching at our beautiful library and will bring lots of starting places of inspiration), the reality and metaphor of living on a small island in crazy times, creative reciprocity with place, creature intelligence, animism, emotional expression, and comically dealing with tragedy or tragically relating to comedy (sometimes called clown).
Elena is interested in exploring the immediacy and collaboration of place based art making in creating connection to one another, ourselves, and our place on earth.
How do we inhabit place? How do we listen with our whole body to the land? What does art and beauty making in service to dwelling within place and community look like? Elena holds this kind of art making as a gift to all the non human others and stories we dwell amidst. Which is ever needed in darker times.
Once a week starting in May at the library, with homework! (Fun homework). You don’t have to come to all, but having a general interest in the whole process which will lead to some kind of community sharing is desired (you don’t have to perform, and there will be other ways to participate)
ODE TO THE WILD
6 Tuesdays 6-8:30/9 begins May 27th-July 1st
Community Room at Library
We will start at the library but may venture out for some land art experiences.
Wear clothes you can move in that you don’t mind getting dirty. All bodies, ages, experience welcome.
Elena is the May/June artist in residence at the library. She has been a clown, giant puppet creator, dancer, poet, creator of original theatre, ritual maker, and community facilitator. She has been in a bit of a hibernation over the last decade from physical theatre and is excited to play. She went to Dell Arte School of Physical Theatre and studied with a lot of cool people.
And, you do NOT have to be a theatre person at all to join in.
Theatre folk, visual artists, dancers, ecologists, gardeners, bakers, children, musicians, puppeteers, mask makers, old, young, all in between, storytellers and gatherers, quiet people, loud people, people with nothing and people with everything come join.
“The more kinds of seeds, the more vegetables, the yummier the stew”, says the old woman laughing at the edge of the world throwing ingredients into her pot and stirring reality into being.
To join, please RSVP to nikyta@lopezlibrary.org.