Leave No Trace

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 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, 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.