Roth Gallery, Burlington City Arts, October 19, 2018 – February 9, 2019
In The Air Connects Us, an immersive three-channel video installation, two dancers can be followed as they navigate Shanghai’s bustling streets, urban forests and massive industrial sites searching for experiences of wild amongst dynamically shifting natural and manmade spaces. The work seeks to explore urban environments in a manner akin to how one might expect to explore sites traditionally considered to be “natural;” where all sites are teeming with sentient life forms and where judgement that one environ is superior to the other is suspended. The work acknowledges that humans living in the Anthropocene are still in need of sensuous nourishment despite being increasingly more likely to navigate urban jungles comprised of concrete and glass than an old growth forest and its streams; touch manmade, inanimate materials than the constantly changing and sensing textures of nature; become immersed in the scent of gas and smoke rather than grass and bark; and, spend more time making eye contact with their own digital image than with our human and animal neighbors.
Through movement aimed at exploring, bearing witness to and connecting with place and other, The Air Connects Us redefines wild as something to be found not only at the edge of a dark forest or atop a mountain’s summit, but in the depths of an unfamiliar city, aboard a high-speed train hurtling across vast expanses, and in the unwavering gaze of another sentient being. The work furthermore looks beyond plant and animal life and makes visible the sentience of a place, in this case, the ever-changing city of Shanghai. The title serves as a sharp reminder that despite our best intentions to connect with other sentient forms through increasingly sophisticated and effective sensorization, we often neglect to understand our collective impact as members of a sentient earth. Cultural ecologist David Abram writes “Only as we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our immersion in the invisible air do we start to recall what it is to be fully a part of this world.”
The Air Connects Us was filmed on location in Shanghai and created as part of Jennings’ Becoming Human exhibition with support from Burlington City Arts’ Project VT. Becoming Human was an intermedia collection of works aiming to identify and dissolve barriers between human and wild in the Anthropocene. The Air Connects Us features choreography created and performed collaboratively with Calvin Aham, music composition by Sean Clute, video direction by Jessica Gomula, cinematography by Allen Hahn and costume design by Amy Nielson.