“Swan is a mythopoetic image that appears in many cultures over history,” said Young. “As an image, it came to me, and as an artist, I responded. I was able to see in my mind’s eye the breadth and depth of entering into engagement with the image and how it happens to resonate with this time of life for me as I approach my 59th birthday. I began investigating the image from many different points of view—from mythological sources, poets, painters, dancers and artists.”
read article... The glorious gift of being a human being is what Martina so exquisitely, reverently, and generously has to share. If you've not had the opportunity of experiencing one of her performances, next weekend will be an event you'll want to partake in and share with your loved ones. -Patricia Fenkell, Steiner Educator, 2013 “[Witnessing] the first rehearsal of L. Martina Young’s upcoming performance event, SWAN: a poetical inquiry in dance, text & memoir, I am compelled to share my experience.
I have been privy to Martina’s work for over 25 years and am familiar with her body of work. Swan, (her first full-length performance in 3 years since her bilateral hip replacements), reveals the further deepening and renewed creative imagining of a mature artist who now revels in her ongoing work. Her subtle and deceptively simple movement material gently suggests rebirth, renewal, and the continuing exploration that is essential to a fully lived life. Martina’s [work], so grounded in her own deep knowing, is profound in its ability to engage and fully translate a human depth, such that I was moved to tears. [It] is the universal sense of hope that is deeply rooted in our own notions of re-awakening and re-awakening that this dance so beautifully realizes. [With] an ability to make visible what is invisible, another invited viewer remarked: “It is magical.” - Diane Rugg, Dance Educator on SWAN (rehearsal), 2013 SWAN ROAD
photograph by Artist in Residence Anne Murray, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, Italy 2014. Anne will complete her short film, SWAN ROAD for the SWAN Project. Look for it here.
GIANNI MIMMO Pavia, Italy. 1957. Work :A saxophonist and composer in the fields of jazz and experimentation for over 25 years, he has produced a series of original projects with highly disparate groups. His interest in the contamination between the arts has lead him to participate in numerous interdisciplinary activities, in particular those which examine the relationship between music-text and music-image. I find inspiration for my work in the Great Basin surroundings of Nevada and California- from monochromatic winters to dramatic summer sunrises and sunsets. History and craft techniques of previous cultures, research, travel, and hands-on experience augmented with sophisticated equipment of computers, luscious yarns supply boundless resources. I find the combination of weaving and knitting techniques and textures an inspiration in itself. SWAN: a poetical inquiry in dance, text & memoir ~ part two, "rubedo" Guest Artist: Adela Hyeyeon Park, pianist Installation Artist: Ray Valdez My work evolves from being drawn, lifelong, to the palpable yet silent habitations of persons in their bodies and the instinctive empathic responses I experience therein. My choreographic process reaches for, gathers, and develops a compassionate relationship with such habitations through this body, and there discovers the poetic gesture, —felt corporeal realities resonant and readily perceived by the tactile mind. In performance, I allow time for the content of the poetic moment to penetrate the performed space, honoring the potential for some translation to occur along the nervous system of your body, awakening a shared knowing of how we are this body, together, —a knowing from a distant or even recent past, —ways by which we live, imagine, witness, dream, or suppose a grand communion.
SWAN: "Coniunctio" (part one) “Why SWAN?” I am asked. When a certain kind of image comes to the artist, she responds. The image impresses upon a receptive intellect the way intuition does: unbidden and on its own accord. Devoid of clever witticisms or conceptualizations, the image beckons attention for different reasons altogether. Archetypal in nature, SWAN offers a portal; embracing the call, the artist brings to light what resonates for this time. Why SWAN? For all of the known and unknown reasons the image itself evokes: qualities and ways of being in the world that desire remembrance. Over the years, I have identified and attended to a central thought in my work: the empathic response through aesthetic experience. “What,” I have asked myself over and again, “is translating across the chasms, across cultures, across time?” I think is has something to do with particular attentiveness to the danced moment, a perception that life is being lived in this unique manner, that dancing is a way of being. And the dance, a form combining those elements that by chance and by mastery engenders a shattering that renders the aesthetic and empathic moment at once. Being becomes transparent. In my teaching, writing, lectures, doctoral research, labwork, and performances, the problem of empathy—an inquiry addressed by 20th century German scholar Edith Stein—has therefore come to particularize my aesthetic purview. Since childhood, I have been fraught with the struggle to articulate, accurately, the palpable experience of bodily-felt empathy. Looking out at the peopled world through these eyes, I have taken note of feeling a kind of sadness—for the people, and my own: mine for not wanting especially to be in the world, and the people, perhaps for being in the world too much. The breadth of my work, crystallized through a meditation on a poetics of the body—the felt inferiority of, relationships to, attitudes about, perceptions regarding, feelings for, and the poetic (empathic) possibilities therein—informs this evening’s dance. Performance is communal in the ancient sense of the term; thus my desire is that you exit this portal with an experience that sheds light on something having to do with you—thoughts that this work is an occasion for— perhaps insights into your own bodily being, and by extension, a re-awakened and particularized recognition of the shared and fragile content of all bodies that make up this world. -Martina |