Community Art at Fulton Farm

2020

Assistant Professor of Dance Megan Mizanty teamed up with local filmmakers ProArts media to create a "socially distant dance film" on Fulton Farm.  The collaboration involved other dance educators from Shippensburg and Carlisle, and the small group imagined how to film a dance outdoors exploring connection, breathing and moving with others during a pandemic.  The original music was composed by London-based band Arctic Lake.  The film was completed in 2021, and they planned to submit the finished product to national and international film festivals.  

Waiting in Air 
Dancers: Anu Shah, Jessica Larkin, Sarah Skaggs and Amanda Chestnut. 
Choreographer: Megan Mizanty 

2017

The Fulton Performance Project is a collaboration between the Fulton Center for Sustainability Studies, the Department of Fine Arts & Dance at Wilson College, and visiting dance artist Rori Smith. From August to November 2017, student and alumni dancers worked with Smith to capture the waning season on Fulton Farm, from the last summer harvests to the stillness of winter's approach. The dancers' movement responds to interviews conducted with farm staff and former interns, who spoke to Fulton Farm's unique sense of place and the embodied experiences they carry with them from time spent immersed in the land. 

Rori says...Any time that a body comes in contact with the natural environment there is relationship. There is dialogue and exchange on the most organic level, through cells and tissues, respiration, perspiration, and endlessly diverse sensations. These exchanges are generative and regenerative...they are creative. In 2016 I became interested in studying both the movements and values of communities who are bound together through farming and gardening as a form of self-cultivation. Reflecting their actions and experience, which often go unwitnessed, through dance performance. I began with community gardens, which are sites of respite, grounding, and belonging - very personal self-reflection and development often occurs within their plots. By bringing the project to Fulton Farm, the lens could shift to explore a different model of self-cultivation. The students of Fulton Farm are preparing themselves to be lifelong advocates for and protectors of the generative forces of the natural world. I thank them for sharing themselves with the project, Chris and Megan for creating the opportunity for this investigation to unfold, Jamie and Sami for investing themselves in the process. I hope you enjoy the film. 

Watch The Fulton Performance Project here.