Bautanzt Here and glo platform celebrate Atlanta with dance in outdoor spaces

Many dance companies hit pause on performing during June, July and August to focus on summer intensives and artist residencies. For Atlanta dance enthusiasts and the performance art curious, however, this summer features several opportunities to experience the unique artistry of site-specific dance in lively, family-friendly outdoor programs from Bautanzt Here and glo platform.

While the shift to outdoor performances in 2020 was an innovative response to pandemic theater closures, it was also a return of sorts to dance’s historical roots in public ritual and its place in the public square.

For artists such as Nadya Zeitlin, founder and executive artistic director of Bautanzt Here, and Lauri Stallings, glo’s founder and self-described “social practice choreographer,” preserving dance’s connections to communities and the particular places they inhabit drew them from the theater into urban and pastoral landscapes long before Covid-19.

During the past three years, Zeitlin has received support from Arts & Entertainment Atlanta, the Fulton County Public Arts Program and the Hambidge Cross-Pollination Art Lab to create work that engages with sites such as Fulton County’s Central Library and Sol LeWitt’s 54 Columns installation in Midtown.

For this summer’s project, funded in part by a grant from the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Zeitlin has teamed up with musician and choreographer Xavier Lewis/Xay Zoleil and community event organizer WeOnFyre to offer the Site-Specific Dance Hub. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, the project includes several free performances and will culminate in a signature WeOnFyre Cypher, where the audience is invited to participate in creating hip-hop-inspired dance, music and visual art in Grant Park on July 23.

Over two weekends, eight dancers will present material created during the workshop portion of the Site-Specific Dance Hub in collaboration with each other,  Zeitlin and Lewis. According to Lewis, speaking in an interview with ArtsATL, the choreography, music, costumes and visual design will connect Atlanta places and artists to hip-hop’s origins in Kingston, Jamaica, and DJ Kool Herc “who we consider the originator and godfather of hip-hop, who brought the Jamaican style called ‘dubbing and toasting’ to New York, where it became ‘rapping and mixing.’”

Zeitlin began her creative journey into the world beyond the theater proscenium as a dancer in her hometown of Almaty in Kazakhstan. “I got hooked as a performer first,” she said in a recent interview with ArtsATL. “I was attending a workshop where we were learning to tell stories informed by spaces we chose. I was blown away by the variety of little performances my peers created on stairs, benches, on and under the bridge, and I remember thinking ‘there could be so much more.” I also remember the feeling of excitement when passers-by stopped to watch us.”

Zeitlin moved to Atlanta in 2013 and made her mark initially by performing with several established Atlanta companies and showing her independent work at local dance festivals. She was in the process of establishing Bautanzt Here (Bautanzt is “building dance” in German) when Covid-19 sent the city into lockdown in 2020.

Because Bautanzt Here’s mission was to bring dance to public spaces, though, the company was a perfect fit for pandemic-era outdoor programming efforts like the Atlanta BeltLine Festival and ELEVATE Atlanta.

The offering from Stallings and glo, Springs and Edens, celebrates the city’s hidden pockets of wilderness rather than its status as a nerve center of popular culture. Nonetheless, like the Site-Specific Dance Hub, Springs and Edens, which “interacts with the environments of Atlanta’s historic springs,” invites public participation in dance-making and draws attention to Atlanta’s resources along with its generative potential.

Back home after a June tour of The Traveling Show in Camden, Gee’s Bend and Selma, Alabama, Stallings and glo opened Springs and Edens at Cascade Springs Nature Preserve. The series will feature a total of six choreographic activations, running through the end of July.

On Sunday, July 16, glo will also host the final community sowing of the third cycle of 17th Street Prairie, in which glo members join the community in planting seeds together as part of a land art project to develop an oasis of natural beauty in downtown Atlanta.

Speaking with ArtsATL, longtime glo collaborator Mary Jane Pennington, who leads glo’s LAB studies educational program, described one of the things she loves most about participating in the company’s work: “No matter where glo is, it’s about connection. It’s about the beautiful stranger. It’s about reverence for the cycles of nature. If we’re under a roof, glo brings inside the verve of the sidewalks and the ancestry of trees and the grass.”

Similarly, glo artistic associate Hiroko Kelly, who joined the company in 2014, emphasized the special role the public plays in creating site-specific dance: “In these places, being heart-to-heart with the public, the choreographies become larger than in the studio or onstage. Site-specific work unfolds in the relationship between the art and the public, transforming into something more.”

Bautanzt Here Site-Specific Dance Hub free performances:

July 15, 6:30 p.m. at Blue Heron Nature Preserve, 4055 Roswell Road NE

July 16, 6:30 p.m. at Grant Park, 840 Cherokee Ave. SE

July 22, 6:30 p.m at Noguchi Playground, Piedmont Park, Active Oval Loop

July 23, 6:30 p.m. at Grant Park, Cypher by WeOnFyre, starts at 5 p.m., 840 Cherokee Ave. SE

glo platform Springs and Edens free performances:

July 21, 8:30 p.m., July 23, 8:30 p.m., and July 30, 5 p.m. at Ponce de Leon Springs, 680 Dallas St. NE

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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a bachelor of arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.