Photo by Julie Lemberger. All photos courtesy of the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
“Noli timere,” Latin for “be not afraid,” were the final words of poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who sent them in a text to his wife shortly before his death in 2013.
The phrase is also a fitting title for a bold aerial performance coming to Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts next week that lays bare the courage of all involved.
In shows set for October 9 and 10, dancers will navigate a shimmering double-decker net suspended above the stage in the Moore Theater. Every step, every shift of body weight causes the net to ripple and sway.
“Each dancer is putting their life, their body, their safety in the hand of another and the sculpture itself is a way of seeing the change of the relationships between them,” said visual artist Janet Echelman, who designed the nets in collaboration with choreographer Rebecca Lazier.
Photo by Julie Lemberger
Creating “Noli Timere” meant taking a leap of faith for both artists. Echelman, a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient whose large-scale installations have been exhibited internationally, had never made them for human use, though she’d imagined what it might look like for one of her sculptures to “become a dancer.”
Meanwhile Lazier, also a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor at Princeton University, had never choreographed for an aerial setting.
The artists became interested in merging their two disciplines after meeting at a conference in 2018. “We both really were captivated by each other’s work,” Lazier said.
It took many minds to design nets that could accommodate the dancers’ weight and movements. Much of that work transpired in a class Lazier and Echelman co-taught at Princeton that brought together students, sound designers, engineers, and mathematicians.
Those early days of experimentation were tinged with uncertainty, and Lazier worried at one point that the dancers would look like a “bag of cats.”
“One of the interesting things about making art is that you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lazier said. “You really have to lean into that unknowing and keep asking the questions.”
The nets the collaborators eventually developed are woven from colorful braided twine. “My goal artistically was to create an expressive range of emotional color that we could adapt within the context of Rebecca’s choreography,” Echelman said.
Indeed, the nets don’t represent a physical place so much as an emotional one that’s explored through dance.
Photo by Marie-Andrée Lemire.
On her website, Echelman notes that “Noli Timere” is the first work she’s made that’s about love.
To love, she said, “is to allow oneself to be vulnerable to another person,” the same way the dancers rely on each other to navigate the nets, to create solid ground where none exists.
It’s an instability many of us are familiar with, but that’s rarely expressed so visibly.
Canadian composer Jorane helped build that atmosphere with her otherworldly score, which blends ethereal vocals with live instruments.
“I think the voice brings together the humanness” of the dance, Lazier said.
Hosting “Noli Timere” at the Hop also took some planning. A building engineer had to check that the Moore’s ceiling could support the weight of the dancers and the nets, along with a massive rectangular truss from which the nets will hang, said Johanna Evans, the Hop’s director of programming initiatives. Two 250-gallon water tanks will also be used as ballast to stabilize the truss, said senior production manager Jessie Sullivan.
The show gives the Hop a chance to flex its muscles since returning to its home turf last fall following a $123.8 million renovation and expansion that took a couple years.
“One of the things we were most excited about getting back into the building to present was spectacle,” said Evans, who experienced “Noli Timere” at Princeton last year and was amazed by the way it fused sculpture with dance. “It really is a different approach to the questions about our relationship with the environment,” Evans said in a recent interview.
Photo by Julie Lemberger.
Those questions will reemerge throughout the Hop’s upcoming slate of programming.
In March, the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra will perform Pulitzer-prize winning composer Caroline Shaw’s score to accompany “Trees,” a documentary from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Green and activist Rebecca Solnit that explores humans’ connection to the trees.
A month later, artists from the Portland, Oregon dance company BodyVox will introduce “Beautiful Everything,” a four-part piece about the evolution of the natural world, in collaboration with the Grammy-Award-winning quintet Imani Winds.
Visitors will also be given opportunities to learn more about “Noli Timere” during several events scheduled around the performances. Echelman will give a talk about her practice at 3:30 p.m. next Wednesday, Oct. 7 in the Hood Auditorium, and a pre-show talk with Lazier and Dartmouth’s Dance Ensemble Choreographer-in-Residence Rebecca Stenn is set for 1 p.m. next Saturday, Oct 10. People can also explore the nets at a family workshop at 10 a.m. the same day. Tickets for the event are $15.
Lazier, for her part, encourages viewers to discover what “Noli Timere” means to them, to leap into thin air and see where they land.
Marion Umpleby is a former staff writer at the Valley News. Now a freelance writer based in Lebanon, she covers arts and culture, among other areas. She can be reached at [email protected].
