Hana van der Kolk

STRANGE NATURE

Guided by dancers, makers, researchers, facilitators Lea Kieffer and Hana van der Kolk, Strange Nature began at the Field Center in 2022 with the curatorial and match making vision of Jared Williams, and reconvened in 2023 and 2024. Stay tuned for more on Strange Nature 2025.

For dancers, artists, writers, schemers, activists, healers, and other freaks, Strange Nature is a week-long dive into world-building, material intimacies/object oriented disorientation, monstrous becoming, temple configuring, psycho-physical interruptions/expansions, gentle and excessive adornment, and celebration. Through body/flesh, attention, and imagination-centering practices, work with textiles, objects, space, and costume, and group ritual we will “dialogue” with ourselves, one another, and everything to ask: how and why might we become more tender, more monstrous, more clairvoyant, more fluid; recognizing/uncovering our already multiple, hybrid, contradictory, messy, monstrous selves, groupings, world in the process. While our collective intention will be with experience for experience’s sake, individuals may find themselves drawn to thread aspects of our work together into independent projects within and/or after the workshop in the form of costumes, performance, writing, socio-political proposals, pedagogy and more.

Convening shortly after the presidential election, Strange Nature 2024 gathered in particular around the invitation of staying with—the ugly, the trash, the horrific, the confusing, the incongruous, the boring…We wondered what becomes in the ferment, the rot, the decay, the composted? What alchemizes, transforms, surprises, fools, delights? In this asking, we call in the cave, the swamp, the cocoon, as well as the chrysalis, the doorway, and the threshold. We beg for complexity and are on our knees at the feet of multiplicity, listening for…

In 2023, we gathered around water, the temple, the monster, and the shapeshifter.