Ecotopian Toolmakers Workshop Series: Embodied Scientist Parkour with the Environmental Performance Agency
3650 Wharton Street (intersection of Wharton Street and Schuylkill Avenue at the entrance to the Grays Ferry Dupont Crescent Trail in Forgotten Bottom)
Join the Environmental Performance Agency for the pilot of Embodied Scientist Parkour, a training for interspecies communication and deepened relationships with the in-between landscapes of the Schuylkill River. Together we’ll engage in a collection of movement scores to entangle our bodies with wild urban plants, vibrate with the multispecies highway, and develop new forms of intimacy with the river’s edge - all with the aim of expanding our notion of how we can collect and co-generate embodied scientific data. Share your embodied data: #embodiedscientist
The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) is an artist collective founded in 2017 and named in response to the proposed defunding of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Appropriating the acronym EPA, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency – using artistic, social, and embodied / kinesthetic practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment, specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant. Current EPA Agents include Catherine Grau, andrea haenggi, Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, and spontaneous urban plants.
Catherine Grau is a Queens-based artist and EPA agent. In her predominantly collaborative practice, she fosters embodied research methodologies, collective experiences and intimate encounters that aim to generate processes of de-colonizing and unlearning anthropocentric paradigms.
Andrea Haenggi has a research-based creative practice she calls Ethnochoreobotanography that employs her roles as a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, dancer, radical care sitter, somatic educator and EPA agent. Her sensual-bodily-tough works confront audiences with a world beyond humans.
Christopher Lee Kennedy is an EPA agent, transdisciplinary artist and educator who creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’ and the biocultural possibility of interspecies agency and collaboration.
Ellie Irons is an artist, educator, and EPA-agent based in Brooklyn & Troy, NY. She works in a variety of media, from drawing to gardening, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with ecological systems. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Electronic Arts at RPI in Troy, NY.
The Embodied Scientist Parkour was developed in collaboration with Philadelphia-based artists who played a research and consultation role:
Aislinn Pentecost-Farren is an artist and curator with particular focus on parks, public history and ecology. Currently she curates a site-specific environmental artist residency and after-school program with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, and is an artist and curator for a series of community-engaged art projects based out of Bartram’s Garden, the first botanical garden in the United States.
Thomas Choinacky crafts spatial experiences through genre-defying performance. A queer, interdisciplinary artist Thomas has been the grantee of 1812 Productions’ Jilline Ringle Solo Performance Program and has been awarded artist residencies at Kultuuritehas Polymer in Tallinn, Estonia and Elsewhere in Greensboro, NC. He is a founding member of Applied Mechanics, a radical, immersive theater collective based in Philadelphia, PA.