Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 20th Anniversary Season Celebrating 20 Years In 20 Weeks Continues With WE WALK

Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance partnered with The American Society of Landscape Architects, New York Chapter (ASLA/NY), Streetopia UWS, and Manhattan Community Board 7 to present WE WALK: Streets For Connection, a demonstration of community and culture in action on the Open Street on West End Avenue between 88th and 93rd Streets. The occasion was PARK(ing) Day, an annual international event where artists, residents, and activists temporarily transform curbside parking spots into public spaces. For the past two years, TLD has produced "Spot for Dance" festivals in curbside parking spaces.

This year, the company and a diverse group of partners transformed not only the parking spaces, but several blocks of West End Avenue for socially-distant activations including dance and music performances, a temporary parklet, chalk-art, tai chi lessons, mask-making, streetscape visioning projects, and civic engagements.

For the occasion, TLD presented excerpts of Plastic Harvest, a new dance work choreographed by Jody Sperling and themed around plastic pollution on West End Avenue between 91st and 92nd Streets. In costumes fashioned from plastic bags, each of the dancers inhabited a world of her own creation. One dancer took a bath in a hundred plastic bags filling a large cardboard tub. Another, glided in a plastic-bag kimono enacting a transformative ritual. The dancers also took turns scootering around the avenue, serving up fantastical plastic antics. Cellist N. Scott Johnson accompanied. Dancers were Anika Hunter, Maki Kitahara, Andrea Pugliese-Trager, and Jody Sperling. Plastic Harvest will culminate in a dance film to be released later this fall.

WE Walk further provided the opportunity for a new collaboration between TLD's dancers and musicians from The Metropolitan Orchestra. A string quartet played folk dance-inspired repertory as the dancers improvised to activate the streetscape.

Other WE Walk events included an improvisation from jill sigman/thinkdance about reclaiming outdoor space and socially-distanced Tai Chi EasyTM /Qigong lessons provided by Good Energy Wellness & Movement. Activities and stations were dispersed to allow for safe physical distancing but were connected with a common goal of celebrating streets for people and communities. WE Walk aims to collectively envision new ways to adapt our street infrastructure and public spaces to promote health, vibrancy, and equity.

Public health and safety is central to the mission of WE Walk. As such, mask-wearing and social-distancing were required in order to participate.