Blowing in the wind, in a COVID-era dance by Jody Sperling

Dance

Don’t tell me just because I live in Los Angeles, I am plastic! The world is conspiring to make us all that way! As choreographer Jody Sperling notes, plastic is something we all share — in a bad way. We wear it, we swim in it, we ingest it, we even inhale it. We are in a scourge of plastic pollution.

So contends this activist choreographer, who via her dance company of twenty years, Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance, has practiced dance plasticity, famously in tandem with fabric and lights as a leading force preserving the heritage of Loie Fuller. Environmentalism is an issue she is clearly concerned by and that she addresses in a new work, “Plastic Harvest.”  

The virtual program, which is co-sponsored by The Center at West Park and includes a film and artist talk back, Sperling hopes, will “help us move us toward a more embodied, sustainable and equitable future.” In the film, one dancer luxuriates in a bathtub filled with plastic bags. Another glides, ghostlike, in a plastic-bag kimono through a church sanctuary. Sporting a plastic tutu emblazoned with yellow-smiley face, a third frolics amid traffic on a busy avenue.  

The music is by environmental composer Matthew Burtner. The film features dancers Frances Barker, Morgan Bontz, Carly Cerasuolo, Anika Hunter, Maki Kitahara, and Andrea Pugliese-Trager.

One note: this is labeled a “work in process.”


Plastic Harvest, a Covid-era dance film by Jody Sperling | Tues Dec 15, 7 pm ET | reservations/tickets

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