TNMOT AZTRO RETURNS WITH NEW PERFORMANCE
The 2-day performance installation titled “Vault” will debut May 6th & 7th.
Photographed by Adrian Martinez Chavez
For anyone who’s attended a Tnmot Aztro performance before, you know they’re never one to disappoint. Hartford native, Arien Wilkerson, the Creative Director and mastermind behind the performance company has a strong track record of producing immersive shows that intertwine mediums between movement, sound, and set design. Their new collaborative production, titled Vault has been a piece developed and evolving over the last several years and will finally be available to witness in person Saturday, May 6th, and Sunday, May 7th.
Photographed by David Norori
HOW DO YOU VAULT?
[Performance overview cited from tnmotaztro.com/vault]
Vault is a performance dance piece made in collaboration between Hartford, New Haven, and Philadelphia-based artists Marisa Williamson, Nicholas Serrambana, Arien Wilkerson, and Kevin Hernández Rosa. Together, under the auspices of Herb Virgo founder and director of the Keney Park Sustainability Project, Vault is an interdisciplinary and collaborative space-making project that transforms John C. Clark Elementary, a shuttered public school in the North End of Hartford, into an outdoor exhibition space through dance, performance, and monumental public art. Vault erects a new performance space out of the ruins of another. The performance space is a hybrid space that is neither a place of transit nor one of gatherings. It takes audiences through the literal landscape of abandoned and poisonous elementary schools in New England cities and across the U.S. that will feel familiar to some, and foreign to others. Vault is interpellation through dance. In Vault, performance is metaphorically an alchemical tool for the transmutation of a space from one of loss into one of recreation and re-creative. Vault convenes voices and stories from parents, community members, and students affected by the contaminated school, creating a soundtrack to move by. Vault is a generative and open structure that valorizes collective incompleteness. Vault proposes a space for dance as a reparative act.
Photographed by David Norori
For 7 years, Vault Members: Kevin Hernandez Rosa, Nicholas Serrambana, Marisa Williamson, and Arien Wilkerson, have met with city legislators, funders, scientists, strategists, sustainability experts, and local members to produce a homecoming performance that allows students, teachers, and parents to share, archive, and reflect on their experiences at John C. Clark Elementary and other shuttered schools. For context, about 350 Clark students were moved to three other city schools in mid-January of 2015 after toxic chemicals (carcinogens, exposure to which is a known risk factor in the development of a host of other long-term health effects such as cancer)— were found as workers prepared to install a fire sprinkler system. Clark Elementary closed as state public health officials tried to assure the school employees and parents that the elevated PCB levels in Clark's air did not pose a health risk. The assurance never came.
Vault will be the culmination of efforts to understand the human body and the North End of Hartford as engaged (but also in conflict) with history and its surroundings. This performance uses embodiment techniques to access conscious and subconscious histories of the community, their institution, ethics, and codes creating a lasting framework for addressing the social-emotional consequences of closing the school.
[Text cited from the performance’s press release.]
Excerpts pulled from Vault_Mapping.pdf
Vault in many ways can be interpreted as a case study and incorporates a mixture of digital and recorded materials. Arien is referring to this piece as a homecoming performance for themselves. They recently were selected as the new University of the Arts iLab artist in residence with a 10-month residency studio space and access to all Uarts facilities as they create new work. Hartford native, Kevin Hernandez Rosa has also produced work that channels his experience relating to public safety within Hartford schools. Below is a 35-minute video performance produced by the collaborative team and released with a digital score composed by Nicholas Serrambana, sound designer of Vault.
