At the end of the semester, Theater Studies Professor of the Practice Ellen Hemphill will retire from teaching after 30 years with the department. Before then, she will premiere a collaborative, interdisciplinary new work that is unlike most of her oeuvre.
“North: A Love Letter” is described as a “poetic dance-movement reflection on the loss of sentient creatures on the earth.” Produced by Hemphill’s company Archipelago Theatre/Ciné, it expands Hemphill’s career work in theater choreography, voice and gesture through collaborations with a variety of other artists.
Alongside dancers, photographers, choreographers and others, Hemphill worked with her longtime collaborator, director Jim Haverkamp, lecturing fellow of Cinematic Arts, and Andrea Woods Valdés, associate professor of the practice of Dance.
Here, Hemphill discusses “North,” her creative process, collaborating with other experts and what comes next.
North will be screened March 25–27 and April 1–3 in the Rubenstein Arts Center Film Theater.
I traveled to many northern places at home and abroad when I first started working on this piece, talking to scientists and artists about climate effects on animals. Then, as were many people during the pandemic, I was in deep isolation during the past two and half years.
In that time, a deer herd gathered in my yard and has been there for two years: at dusk, at dawn. I feed them, watch them, walk among them. I saw newborns, the elderly, the change of seasons, and watched their coats transform from spring fawn speckled to long winter coats forecasting this particularly cold season.
I saw them fight and hurt each other. I saw them groom and protect each other. I saw a matriarchal society at work.
Watching the herd dynamics just sent me down a different path from the beginning of the ideas in “North.” In one section of the film called “Bewilderment,” my co-writer and co-thinker Nor Hall quoted “to bewilder is to lose one sense of where one is.” Another author calls it “a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.” One cannot find one's place.
I think the combination of the political climate, the shock of the pandemic and the too-slow realization of climate related stress issues has bewildered so many people.
If one considers how climate change, how man-made borders and barriers affect the movement of people across the world, one also has to consider how animals are losing their intuitive sense of thousands of years of migratory patterns because of our actions on the planet. And imagine their bewilderment.
Although I have done several films, it is not a particularly typical description of my work, because usually my work is theater based on stylized movement and voice work. But many things led to this idea.
This was originally going to be for the stage, and then COVID took care of that, so we started talking with three choreographers — Mark Haim, Gerri Houlihan and Terry Beck — about how we could do choreography from a long distance through Zoom.
I've always been connected to dance in some form through my entire career. I am a choreographer of theater, so in this piece I’ve worked with these three wonderful choreographers who are quite well known in their field and in their unique work as dancers, as well as choreographers. The composer, Allison Leyton-Brown, took their ideas and created the score.
Actors and dancers acting out animals is not interesting. But movement on the themes facing the animals might be. What would the loss, say of elephants, mean to us? What would it be like to send a love letter back to these animals? To express appreciation in some way for their existence that has allowed us see the natural world and experience our relationship to all these creatures — birds animals, insects, everything that we take for granted?
We asked ourselves these questions and, as artists, have attempted to express what form, through our different artistic lenses, this letter would look like. I am fortunate to be working with many fine artists in several fields that have brought this vision together in this film.
The dances were based on prompts I gave to the choreographers. I also gave the cast a collective gestural vocabulary that the choreographers used. The prompts were things like “migration,” “bewilderment” and “borders, extinction.”
These are great choreographers and artists, so they ran with the suggestions. For example, when people or animals hit a border that's man-made, what do they do? Where do they go?
This is not a documentary. I don't have the scientific background to do a “National Geographic” film. I'm an artist, so I try to use that sensibility for this topic.
I have a good friend that I grew up with, Wink Gaines, who is an award-winning wildlife photographer, so I spoke to her about it. And then there are two other photographers who I spoke to: Nina Hale and Judith Scott. Their photography, and sometimes video, is being used along with other photos and film as the imagery background.
The texts are based on a collection of poets and writers we researched, and some original writing from different people among us. It’s cited in the work and offers commentaries on each of those prompts. We were looking for texts that were a meditation, in a sense, on the topics in each section.
So the film is a collage of dance, text, music and film/photography.
They called it experimental theater. They called it devised theater. They called it avant-garde theater. Now it’s process theater. It’s always been the same thing, just change what is called. But that's always been what I came from.
I was with the Roy Hart Theatre in the south of France for 13 years, and we focused on the voice and text; but we brought in and studied with dance companies from all over Europe. We exchanged techniques with other companies. That was a very much the era of group theater in Europe in the 1970s and ‘80s.
I went to Japan and studied Japanese theater. I studied with a woman out of Pina Bausch’s dance company from Wuppertal, Germany. I studied flamenco and mime and clowning.
All of this, along with the voice work, impacted my performance and teaching work. One learned from other masters how to add to your own approach to your work. I was trained early on to be very disciplined in my own work, but also enrich and expand my vision and to never stop learning.
I've done two other pieces in the last — almost 10 years now. One was called “The Narrowing,” and the next one was called “The Reckoning.” I always felt like there was a final piece to this trilogy, and now this one is called “North: A Love Letter.”
All of them are addressing the human condition. A little bit unknown to me at the time, of course, but in “The Reckoning” I was creating something that was really about what has happened between Trump and the pandemic. It’s just kind of a failure of all systems, and it was probably the darkest thing I've ever done.
Before that I directed and created over twenty performances and several films.
Historically, we have sent films to the festivals, and I think we'll probably try to focus on festivals that are dance and environmental or nature-oriented.
Festivals are the best way to get the film more exposure. It’s very different than theater, though, because you don't see an audience’s reaction, which is part of the beauty of theater. But the life span of a film is longer.
I also want to be sure to send the film, if it's appropriate, to nonprofits for environmental causes or that work with animal preservation.
I feel like my energy really is focused on my creativity. So it's just time to focus on that.
I plan to do a collaborative book on the legacy of my work with Archipelago Theatre/Ciné of the last 30 years. Apart from all this, I am a collage artist for myself. I do hands-on work, so I will probably spend some time in the studio just until I get my creative brain going again!
I will also be offering private consulting through my business called Cardea Creative Consulting that will focus on three things: the art of public speaking, going into arts companies to see where their issues are in working together, and, as I have a degree in counseling psychology, I am interested in private counseling/coaching in somatics and voice.
So, I am not really retiring.
Theater Studies