Created specifically for Pillow Fort Arts Center, Leave No Trace is a new site-specific performance and visual installation by JoAnna Mendl Shaw and The Equus Projects, developed during a weeklong residency with local dancers and artists.
Here in the watershed, laws protecting New York City’s water supply have shaped what—and how—land can be developed, creating ongoing tensions between preservation, economic development, and the realities of living and working on the land.
Movement, sound, fabric, and found materials transform the landscape of the Pillow Fort Dance Deck, with performers moving through the surrounding forest and hillside as audiences, seated on the deck, face outward toward the trees.
JoAnna’s years of interspecies work in rural communities have shaped her approach to movement and community engagement, developing practices of listening, scoring, and responding to people, place, and the more-than-human. Leave No Trace brings this way of working into the terrain of Pillow Fort, asking what our role is in an ever-evolving landscape.
Performances: Sat/Sun Sep 26 & 27 | 3PM*
Drop in movement workshops: Mon/Tue/Wed Sep 21-23 | 10AM-12PM
*Saturday only, join us for a cookout after the show to meet the artists and mingle!
Please RSVP in advance.
Veteran choreographer and dance educator, JoAnna Mendl Shaw has been expanding the parameters and strategies for dance-making, since 1998.
Her company, The Equus Projects, tours throughout the States and Europe, creating site-specific works in immersive collaboration with local communities.
Shaw has taught on faculty at NYU, The Juilliard School, Alvin Ailey BFA and Certificate Programs, Princeton University, Mount Holyoke College, Montclair State, Marymount Manhattan and most recently as a Visiting Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. She has been a Visiting Artist at University of Florida, Ohio State, Colorado State, Dickinson College, Point Park College, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Shaw is the recipient of two NEA Choreographic Fellowships and multiple NEA grants for the Equus Projects’ Interdisciplinary Performances. She has brought her somatic practice of Physical Listening into elementary schools and academic think tanks, the Naval War College, workshops at NYU Medical School and Stanford School of Medicine. Shaw is a certified Laban Movement Analyst and the author of the 2022 book, Physical Listening, A Dancer’s Interspecies Journey.
Shaw has served on the Board of Directors of Ping Chong Company and Ice Theatre of New York, a Founding Board Member of The Gender Project, Career Transitions for Dancers and DANCE RISING. 200