Event Details

Speakers:  Prof. Devavani Chatterjea, Biology Department Macalester College, and Donna Sternberg, Choreographer

The dance film Earth Body brings dancers and audiences into sites of disruption – warming ocean, an overflowing recycling center, post-wildfire landscapes. This love song to a feverish, ailing planet calls on us to pay collective, caring attention to our changing climate and begin the hopeful healing we need to survive.  This film will be viewed with questions following.  Earth Body was co-created by Donna Sternberg and Devavani Chatterjea with dancers Alaya Oni, Moi, Laura Ann Smyth, and Stephanie Cheung, costumer Rosalida Melida, and filmmaker Michael Masucci, with original music by Ari Frankel. Earth Body was selected for showing at the 2021 Toronto International Dance Festival.

Donna Sternberg, founder of Santa Monica, CA -based Donna Sternberg and Dancers (since 1985) has professionally premiered over 90 works since 1975 throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, and Mexico; frequently collaborating with artists of other disciplines including composers, visual artists, poets, actors, and digital media as well as scientists.  Devavani Chatterjea is a professor of Biology at Macalester College. An immunologist and environmental health scientist, her research intersects inflammation, chronic pain and environmental exposures. She asks questions and tells stories through science, teaching, poetry, and movement. Donna and Devavani met at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program’s inaugural Science/Arts Residency in July 2014, and have continued to collaborate ever since co-creating dances that investigate patterns and disruptions of health in our individual and collective bodies.

Refreshments provided.