*NOLI TIMERE, *****the culmination of a 5-year collaboration between Director / Choreographer Rebecca Lazier and renowned sculptor Janet Echelman, ******is a soaring aerial performance featuring a custom designed, voluminous Echelman net sculpture and 8 outstanding, multidisciplinary performers. The work is a fusion of contemporary dance and avant-garde circus; art installation and advanced engineering; public sculpture and social practice exploring how we navigate an unstable world.
Featuring an original score by French Canadian composer JORANE, and lighting design by award-winning Leigh Ann Vardy, NOLI TIMERE marks the first-time performers will be presented, up to 25 feet in the air, upon and within a suspended Echelman sculpture, wherein choreography and sculpture continually transform each other.
NOLI TIMERE*,*** Latin for 'be not afraid', renders interconnectedness visible, making tangible how a change in one element has cascading effects on its surroundings, demonstrating the fragility of our ecosystem and the need for innovative responses to global challenges.
Rebecca Lazier, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, is a choreographer and educator based in New York and Nova Scotia who has choreographed more than eighty works. Recognized as an audacious experimenter, Lazier creates works of explosive vitality inspired by the thinking and innovation that is possible through collaboration. Her “There Might Be Others”, was commissioned by New York Live Arts and won a New York Performance “Bessie” Award. Lazier is a Professor of the Practice at Princeton University.
Janet Echelman, a renowned American sculptor, reshapes urban airspace with vast, moving sculptures that react to the environmental forces around them. Echelman combines ancient craft with state-of-the-art technology to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents and in North America. Echelman’s TED talk, “Taking Imagination Seriously”, has been translated into 35 languages and received more than two million views.
Support material
NOLI TIMERE trailer (1:30 min video)
Photos by Marie-Andrée Lemire.