Moving Nature Dreams at Lincoln Park
A site-specific, promenade-style interactive dance performance that engages the audience along the North Pond in Lincoln Park to bring awareness to the importance of our natural surroundings. In the performance series, choreographer Nejla Yatkin will engage pedestrian and trained dancers alike in dance and movement meditation process designed to heighten the senses through observation, heuristic conversation, and dancing in nature. Featured guest artist Irene Hsiao, Ricardo Garcia will dance and activate spaces along with Nejla Yatkin.
Loïe Fuller inspired costume courtesy of the Chicago Moving Company.
Where: behind The Nature Museum on the Fishing pier at the North Pond in Lincoln Park.
When: Performances: Sat, Sept 14th Sun, Sept 15th and Sun, Sept 22nd from 5pm to 6:30pm
Please RSVP at nejla@ny2dance.com
Moving Nature Dreams at Lincoln Park by Nejla Y. Yatkin is presented as part of the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks series, supported by the Mayor’s Office and Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Arts programming in neighborhoods across the city advances the goals of the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Cultural Plan. Now in its 7th year, the 2019 Night Out in the Parks series will host over 2,000 cultural events and programs at more than 250 neighborhood parks throughout the city, making community parks a safe haven and hubs of activity. Projects vary from traditional performances and concerts, to peace rallies, community workshops, nature-based programs, dance performances, festivals, site specific projects, and more. The Chicago Park District has partnered with more than 140 arts and community organizations to expand and produce this citywide initiative.
About Nejla Yatkin: Award-winning and critically acclaimed choreographer and dancer, Nejla Yatkin, is a recipient of a 2019 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Award and 3Arts Awardee. Nejla hails from Germany, bringing a luminous, transcultural perspective to her creations. Her focus is regularly drawn to the role that memory and history serve in constructing identity, causing and resolving conflict, and transforming cultural tensions into deep, authentic revelations of human connection.
Her recent dances have been inspired by pivotal events in significant places around the world including The Berlin Wall Project, Oasis: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Middle East but Were Afraid To Dance, and Dancing Around the World, a conceptual site-specific artwork that investigates the potency of urban spaces and the people who inhabit them. Dancing Around The World was a year-long project that circumnavigated the globe, traveling to 20 cities and engaging dozens of communities in movement explorations of their urban environment and their complex relationships to it. Since 2000, Nejla has choreographed solo works inspired by great female choreographers resulting in five evening-length solo works that have toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. In addition, she choreographs for her own project-based company, NY2Dance, and has been commissioned by noted companies including the Washington Ballet, River North Dance Chicago, Modern American Dance Company, Dallas Black Dance Theater among many others. She has been the recipient of four Artist Fellowship Awards for Excellence in Choreography from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and is a three-time recipient of the Creative Performing Arts grant from the University of Maryland. Other awards include the Local Dance Commissioning Project by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and four awards from the National Performance Network.
For her past creations Ms.Yatkin has received five Metro D.C. Dance Awards, including two times for Outstanding Individual Performance, Best Scenic Design, Best Multi-Media Performance, and Best Overall Production. In 2005, she was named as one of theTop 25 To Watch by Dance Magazine and was given the award for Outstanding Emerging Artist by the D.C. Mayor’s Arts Award Committee. A recipient of the 2008 Princess Grace Choreography Fellowship Award, Nejla was subsequently awarded a 2009 Special Project grant by the Princess Grace Foundation as well a 2015 Princess Grace Works in Process Award as Artist-in-Residence at the Baryshnikov Art Center, New York City. Since moving to Chicago she has been awarded the 2012 3Arts Award and the Illinois Individual Project grant. Recent awards nominations include a Drama Desk Award and a Chita Rivera Award for Outstanding Choreography in a Musical. For more information visit www.ny2dance.com
